Daniel > Daniel's Quotes

“Du bist kein Hauptgewinn. Du bist ein Mängelexemplar. Ein zauberhaftes und liebenswertes Mängelexemplar, und wenn da draußen jemand ist, der das sehen kann, dann ist er ein Hauptgewinn, also was stiehlst du meine Zeit mit doofer Selbstgeißelung? Schnapp dir den Typen und hör auf zu jammern!


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― Sarah Kuttner

“Meer ist nichts wert, wenn es sich nicht zu 180 Grad vor mir erstreckt.”
― Sarah Kuttner

“Himmlische Dämpfe erfüllten den Raum. »Wussten Sie, dass sich das Kaffeearoma aus rund tausend verschiedenen Einzelaromen zusammensetzt? Wein bringt es gerade einmal auf vierhundert.« Dupin hatte es nicht gewusst oder, genauer: Er hatte es immer schon gewusst. Schließlich war er aus gutem Grund süchtig.”
― Jean-Luc Bannalec, Bretonische Idylle

“He understood well enough how a man with a choice between pride and responsibility will almost always choose pride--if responsibility robs him of his manhood.”
― Stephen King, The Running Man

“Money can't buy happiness, BUT it can buy books (which is basically the same thing).”
― Shaun Bythell, Confessions of a Bookseller

“In the shop I have a quotation from Erasmus painted on a wall which reads ‘Whenever I have money I buy books. Whatever is left I spend on food and clothes.”
― Shaun Bythell, Confessions of a Bookseller

“This afternoon there was a very satisfying encounter involving a customer who began requesting a discount on a pile of books about the Rolls-Royce company. His friend prodded him in the back and said, ‘You’ve got some nerve, asking for a discount from this poor bloke while you drive about in your fancy Rolls-Royces.’ He didn’t get a discount.”
― Shaun Bythell, Confessions of a Bookseller

“Karl-Heinz ‘fed’ me the entire book over the next seven weeks. The metaphor is exact. The thin wads of pages were like crucial scraps of nutrition. I devoured them. I masticated, swallowed and digested that book. I cracked its bones and sipped its marrow; every fibre of meat, every cartilaginous module of gristle was dined on with gourmandising fervour.”
― Shaun Bythell, Confessions of a Bookseller

“very broadly speaking—people can be divided into two groups: those who have worked in a bar, or café, or restaurant, or shop, and those who have not. And while it would be both unfair and untrue to say that everyone in the latter category treats those in the former as a second-class citizen, it is probably accurate to say that virtually nobody from the first category will do so.”
― Shaun Bythell, Confessions of a Bookseller

“A woman spent about ten minutes looking around the shop, then told me that she was a retired librarian. I suspect she thought that this was some sort of a bond between us. Not so. On the whole, booksellers dislike librarians. To realise a good price for a book, it has to be in decent condition, and there is nothing librarians like more than taking a perfectly good book and covering it with stamps and stickers before – and with no sense of irony – putting a plastic sleeve over the dust jacket to protect it from the public. The final ignominy for a book that has been in the dubious care of a public library is for the front free endpaper to be ripped out and a ‘DISCARD’ stamp whacked firmly onto the title page, before it is finally made available for members of the public to buy in a sale. The value of a book that has been through the library system is usually less than a quarter of one that has not.”
― Shaun Bythell, The Diary of a Bookseller

“At 10.15 a.m. a woman walked in and roared, ‘I am in my element! Books!’, then continued to shout questions at me for an hour while she waddled about the shop like a ‘stately goose’, as Gogol describes Sobakevich’s wife in Dead Souls. Predictably, she didn’t buy anything.”
― Shaun Bythell, The Diary of a Bookseller

“Prefacing a sentence with 'I don't want to appear rude, but...' flags up the same alarm bells as 'I am not racist, but...' It's quite simple: if you don't want to appear rude, don't be rude. If you're not a racist, don't behave like a racist.”
― Shaun Bythell, The Diary of a Bookseller

“At 10 a.m. the first customer came throught the door: 'I'm not really interested in books' followed by 'Let me tell you what I think about nuclear power.' By 10.30 a.m. the will to live was but a distant memory.”
― Shaun Bythell, The Diary of a Bookseller

“Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“Each man for himself in that desert of egoism which is called life.”
― Stendhal, The Red and the Black

“I want us to exist together until we perish. Pure.”
― P.B. Flower, ALL KAAL NONE

“It’s amazing how someone can touch you, even if you only know them for a moment in time. How they can change you, alter you indelibly.”
― Abby Jimenez, Part of Your World

“When you don't care, everything's on your terms. They can take it or leave it. It doesn't matter to you, so ask for whatever the hell you want.”
― Abby Jimenez, Part of Your World

“The last I saw of Count Dracula was his kissing his hand to me, with a red light of triumph in his eyes, and with a smile that Judas in hell might be proud of.”
― Bram Stoker, Dracula

“In this way, I was able to place my own concerns aside and curl myself up in the cocoon of somebody else's imagination. My life was suspended - I was in neither one place nor the other.”
― Kate Kerrigan, Ellis Island

“Good friends are like stars. You don't always see them, but you know they're always there.”
― Christy Evans

“it takes grace to remain kind in cruel situations”
― Rupi Kaur, Milk and Honey

“Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world. VOLTAIRE”
― Jenny Colgan, The Bookshop on the Corner