Jeremy Mercer > Quotes

“Hope is a most beautiful drug.”
― Jeremy Mercer, Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co.

“In a place like Paris, the air is so thick with dreams they clog the streets and take all the good tables at the cafés. Poets and writers, models and designers, painters and sculptors, actors and directors, lovers and escapists, they flock to the City of Lights. That night at Polly's, the table spilled over with the rapture of pilgrims who have found their temple. That night, among new friends and safe at Shakespeare and Company, I felt it too. Hope is a most beautiful drug.”
― Jeremy Mercer, Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co.

“In the end, yes, it is a famous bookstore and, yes, it is of no small literary importance. But more than anything, Shakespeare and Company is a refuge, like the church across the river. A place where the owner allows everyone to take what they need and give what they can.”
― Jeremy Mercer, Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co.

“There is something more to this story, something that to this day makes me wonder about the line between coincidence and destiny.”
― Jeremy Mercer, Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co.

“Give what you can, take what you need’—that’s what I always tell people.”
― Jeremy Mercer, Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co.

“In such a world, things can go bad quickly. My relationship with a good woman began to falter, then broke under the weight of my unhappiness. I couldn’t bear to talk to anyone but police”
― Jeremy Mercer, Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co.

“Time at Shakespeare and Company was as soft as anything I’d ever felt.”
― Jeremy Mercer, Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co.

“Before we left, George gave me a brief lesson on packing. He’d traveled the world with only a change of shirt, a toothbrush, and a book in his pocket. What more did you need other than the coat on your back?”
― Jeremy Mercer, Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co.

“Blind courage, in my mind, is defined by a man who will stand”
― Jeremy Mercer, Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co.

“By the time I had my cup of tea at Shakespeare and Company in January 2000, George was telling people he’d let forty thousand people sleep in his store, more than the population of his hometown of Salem when he was growing up. After my visit, I was intent on becoming the next.”
― Jeremy Mercer, Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co.

“The door kept swinging open, the cold air kept rushing in, the absurd questions kept showering down. “Did William Shakespeare really live here?” asked one particularly misinformed customer.”
― Jeremy Mercer, Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co.

“In 1963, George celebrated his fiftieth birthday, and a year later he changed the name of the store. He’d long been a devotee of Sylvia Beach and admired the name Shakespeare and Company, “a novel in three words,” as he called it. He and Beach met for tea and she even visited Le Mistral on occasion.”
― Jeremy Mercer, Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co.

“George had in the inherent goodness of people. Here we were, a group of virtual strangers, running the famous Shakespeare and Company. Personally, I’d known the man for forty-eight hours and yet I had the keys to both his bookstore and his bedroom in my pocket. Coming from a life of police bulletins and home security systems, such trust seemed almost folly.”
― Jeremy Mercer, Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co.

“Despite these occasional lumps, the life became infectious and he came up with an even grander scheme: to walk around the world, an 113,000-mile journey, with 30,000 of them on foot. He set out from California in 1936 and walked for months, down through Mexico, where he met Mayans in the Yucatan, then onto Belize, where he met some Caribs.”
― Jeremy Mercer, Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co.

“The bookstore was listed in most every guidebook to Paris and visitors burbled into the store in happy droves. They were intoxicated by the books and the bohemian writers who lived among them, all the time spending large sums of their holiday money.”
― Jeremy Mercer, Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co.

“As much as we embraced our bohemian life, we were forced to recognize the reality of our predicament: We were all nearly penniless, mostly homeless, and without proper residence papers or health insurance in a foreign country.”
― Jeremy Mercer, Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co.

“In a place like Paris, the air is so thick with dreams they clog the streets and take all the good tables at the cafés. Poets and writers, models and designers, painters and sculptors, actors and directors, lovers and escapists, they flock to the City of Lights. That night at Polly’s, the table spilled over with the rapture of pilgrims who have found their temple. That night, among new friends and safe at Shakespeare and Company, I felt it too. Hope is a most beautiful drug.”
― Jeremy Mercer, Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co.

“You know, if you’re going to be a writer, you have to love life, and there’s nowhere better to love life than Shakespeare and Company,” he told me. “You can meet just about anybody here, you can read books here, you see beautiful women here. Appreciate places like this, because there aren’t enough of them in the world.”
― Jeremy Mercer, Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co.

“George now has an archive of sociological wonders: tens of thousands of biographies written between the 1960s and today, a vast survey of the great drifters of the past forty years. The task of putting one’s life in words was a chance at confession for many, and among the overflowing file boxes there are stories of love and death, incest and addiction, dreams and disappointments, all with a thumb-sized photograph attached.”
― Jeremy Mercer, Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co.

“No finer way of life is there in all the earth than this,” wrote George at the time. “To wander through the palace of the world on foot, to walk, to dance, to sing, and to read—to read the Book of Life.”
― Jeremy Mercer, Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co.

“For the better part of a century, an English bookstore by the name of Shakespeare and Company has served as a haven for artists, writers, and other wayward souls of Paris.”
― Jeremy Mercer, Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co.

“People all tell me they work too much, that they need to make more money,” George told me. “What’s the point? Why not live on as little as possible and then spend your time with your family or reading Tolstoy or running a bookstore? It doesn’t make any sense.”
― Jeremy Mercer, Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co.

“My favorite is The Idiot. I think I’m a little bit like Prince Myshkin, bumbling along in this world of my dreams, trying to do my best without any grip on reality.”
― Jeremy Mercer, Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co.

“Many wanted to believe that every writer staying at the bookstore was another Hemingway in order to add that certain flare to their vacation. In truth, of the hundreds of poets and writers who pass through the bookstore every year, only a handful ever publish. But, with such bare pockets, Kurt and I saw no reason why we couldn’t indulge the fantasies.”
― Jeremy Mercer, Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co.

“One of the more bizarre plots to date had been a halfhearted attempt to donate Shakespeare and Company to the billionaire philanthropist George Soros.”
― Jeremy Mercer, Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co.

“George then quizzed me about Marx’s funeral. “How many people do you think were there?” he asked. I guessed a few hundred, but George shook his head glumly. Seven. “I don’t know what it all means.” He sighed. “Nobody has the answers. I don’t like people who pretend they do. Life is just the result of a dance of molecules.”
― Jeremy Mercer, Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co.

“All of this means that the bookstore weaves a thin line between romantic tumble and filthy sty, and the delicate balance is forever endangered by the fact that George’s financial modesty extends to bookstore maintenance.”
― Jeremy Mercer, Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co.

“After Beach died in 1962, George bought her collection of books, and then in 1964, on the four hundredth anniversary of William Shakespeare’s birth, he rebaptised his store Shakespeare and Company. Detractors claim he stole the name and profited from the association, but if George were a mercurial sort, he never would have turned his bookstore into a sanctuary for the disaffected and creatively desperate.”
― Jeremy Mercer, Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co.

“You think so?” George said with a modest smile, as if never realizing the extent of his accomplishments. “I like to tell people I run a socialist utopia that masquerades as a bookstore, but sometimes I don’t know.”
― Jeremy Mercer, Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co.

“You know, that’s what I’ve always wanted this place to be,” he said. “I look across at Notre Dame and I sometimes think the bookstore is an annex of the church. A place for the people who don’t quite fit in over there.”
― Jeremy Mercer, Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co.