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

by Alice Hoffman

She wasn’t ready to admit that there were times when a dream was better as a dream than it was in real life.

There are some things you must learn for yourself, and how to find happiness is one of them.

Sometimes you had to reclaim the person you had once been in order to go forward.

Books are always what we need. Don’t forget to look for magic.

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.

Once upon a time I lived in a bookstore, I looked out the window and couldn’t see the beauty of the place, I couldn’t see it until I described it to you.

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

Violet read one book after another, those she had loved as a child and those she’d never read before. The more she read, the more her heart opened. With each book she was reminded of what mattered most.

“Do it,” he said. “That’s my advice. Fall in love. It’s worth it.”

“Life is not about anything being fair,” Johnny said. “It’s about doing the right thing.

Let’s always be here in the wild woods, holding hands, remembering our lives together, listening to the birds fall asleep in the trees, let’s never be apart.

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.