The Bookstore Family (The Once Upon a Time Bookshop Stories)

by Alice Hoffman

Every time a book is reread it’s entirely different depending on who the reader has become.

She had forgotten how books could open the world and make it seem brand new. She’d forgotten that if you accepted the fact that anything might happen, it actually might. You might find a coin on the sidewalk that could grant your wishes, you might drink coffee with a stranger and tell him the story of your life, and when you left you might buy a dozen more books, the ones you loved most, the ones you read when you were ready to step into another life, the one where it just might be possible to have an open heart.

Death wasn’t a foreign country; it was the country we all walked past each and every day.

Sometimes the best thing is to hope for peace, and a view of the beach, and the people you love to be beside you.

They climbed to the top branch where you could see so clearly it seemed that everyone you had ever loved was not so very far away. All you had to do was remember, and there they were.