The Bookstore Quotes

“I think there is no difference between love and infatuation. If it works out, we call it love; if it doesn’t, we shrug our shoulders and say it was infatuation. It’s a hindsight word.”
― Deborah Meyler, The Bookstore

“Used books,” as if someone else has had the best of them and you get the sere husk, or the lees, as if a book isn’t the one thing, the one product, that is forever new. There’s no such thing as a used book. Or there’s no such thing as a book if it’s not being used.”
― Deborah Meyler, The Bookstore

“We're high on the adrenaline of feeling, even though we know it's fleeting and evanescence. And we're getting worse -- checking texts and emails and Facebook every five minutes, always searching for that next hit of feeling, that next morsel of approval.”
― Deborah Meyler, The Bookstore

“The Christmas trees are brought from Vermont by monosyllabic men in warm clothes; they seem alien, closer to the earth, silently contemptuous, like gypsies. They bring in their trees and stand them up on the pavements, so that swaths of Broadway are suddenly transformed into dark, pine-scented avenues.”
― Deborah Meyler, The Bookstore

“It seems shelving is an art, like everything else. I decide to do it exceptionally well.”
― Deborah Meyler, The Bookstore

“I am not sure that there is a choice, or that there are ever choices. Everything that has happened leads up to the next thing. It can look like a choice, but the way we fall is always determined by what went before. So we can’t choose.” Stella”
― Deborah Meyler, The Bookstore

“It’s because we’re all emotion junkies,” he says. He does not look like an emotion junkie. “We’re high on the adrenaline of feeling, even though we know it is fleeting and evanescent. And we’re getting worse—checking texts and e-mails and Facebook every five minutes, always searching for that next hit of feeling, that next morsel of approval.”
― Deborah Meyler, The Bookstore

“People write for ego gratification, not money.”
― Deborah Meyler, The Bookstore

“I love to slip into the bookstore. It is my haven. I don't have to prove myself there.”
― Deborah Meyler, The Bookstore

“Aristotle didn't have a problem with abortion," she says.
"Oh, well, good, that's a comfort," I say.”
― Deborah Meyler, The Bookstore

“there is the smell, too, of course -- the reassuring smell of paper, new paper, soft old paper, recalling each person to the first time they really did press their nose into a book.”
― Deborah Meyler, The Bookstore

“Music is like poetry, It can stop you thinking. But it can also open you up.”
― Deborah Meyler, The Bookstore

“I don't need to buy books. I've got the whole of the library at the New School, as well as my iPad. Why do people still buy books? They just take up space.”
― Deborah Meyler, The Bookstore

“When you take into account ebooks and Kindles and such, we're doing pretty good.”
― Deborah Meyler, The Bookstore

“One age might pass over what another prized, and the next age might then revere it”
― Deborah Meyler, The Bookstore

“I like the fact that Americans all have kettles on the hobs of their ovens; nobody has an electric kettle. It seems connected to the frontier way of life; whether you're in a New York apartment building or you're keeping the coyotes away on the prairie—you need boiling water? Then you need a flame.”
― Deborah Meyler, The Bookstore

“Things didn’t seem promising initially. I arrived like everyone else did, after swearing that I wasn’t a spy or guilty of moral turpitude, and that I hadn’t got any snails. In the first, bewildering minutes outside JFK, on a Friday night in the rain, I stared out at veering yellow cabs, airport staff screaming abuse at cowboy operators, sleek limos nosing along the bedlam, the whole teetering on the brink of chaos. I thought, as many people do, This is impossible. I won’t be able to manage this. But then, we do manage- we manage to get into the city without being murdered, and wake up the next day still alive, and shortly afterwards we are striding down Broadway in the sun.”
― Deborah Meyler, The Bookstore

“but in the bookshop you find things you didn't know about," I reply, " It's much more exciting than Amazon's 'customers who bought this book also bought this one.”
― Deborah Meyler , The Bookstore

“I find over the next few days that acceptance is the way to go. You have to bend your mind around from the path it has always taken to a path where your own direction does not matter. You are there for someone else. It is easier if you don’t struggle against that, if you simply bow your head down to it, acquiesce, comply, love.”
― Deborah Meyler, The Bookstore

“Another person closes you off from the world, but without anyone else there you are like a grain of pollen, vulnerable to or open to all these fleeting relationships. After”
― Deborah Meyler, The Bookstore

“I say it, and even speaking such a dream is to offer it up for taint. As long as it is secret, closed, full of blood, it is inviolable. Now I’ve presented it for piercing. Mitchell”
― Deborah Meyler, The Bookstore

“Used” is such an odd word, so much stranger than “secondhand.” A prefix for condoms, and there’s a certain squalor attached to the idea of reusing those. “Used books,” as if someone else has had the best of them and you get the sere husk, or the lees, as if a book isn’t the one thing, the one product, that is forever new. There’s no such thing as a used book. Or there’s no such thing as a book if it’s not being used. I”
― Deborah Meyler, The Bookstore

“I don’t really see, but I like how his mind works in a different way from mine, in a way that could open mine up.”
― Deborah Meyler, The Bookstore

“Americans have all these classes that mean they just know odd things, so engineers know about William Blake and poets know about analytical geometry. She probably took one on Aristotle and the politics of gender.”
― Deborah Meyler, The Bookstore

“When people say “to father,” they generally mean that one biological act—the act of begetting a child. It is different with the verb “to mother.” “To mother” implies care. A man’s act of fathering can easily be that one seed sown; a woman’s act of mothering can take up all the rest of her life. I”
― Deborah Meyler, The Bookstore

“It's a nebulous thing, but it is my belief—my experience also—that women do not have the need to collect that men have.”
― Deborah Meyler, The Bookstore

“I never got int the library thing. I always liked that I could put my hand on a book when I wanted it. And to know I owned them; that was important too.”
― Deborah Meyler, The Bookstore

“You know, what I've always done is take a look through a book, look at the paper stock, the printing, the publisher, the actual content, and, taking everything into account, I price it. . . . And now I can't. The fact that I can check this book . . . — the fact that I can check this book on the Internet means that I have to check this book on the Internet.”
― Deborah Meyler, The Bookstore

“Used" is such an odd word, so much stranger than "second-hand." A prefix for condoms, and there's a certain squalor attached to the idea of reusing those.”
― Deborah Meyler, The Bookstore

“I finish a short afternoon shift that I spent learning about book descriptions with George. It is an arcane system that the Internet is putting paid to, where fair is foul and good is bad and perfect means you are a charlatan. Price-clipped is bad. Second impression is bad. Inscribed is bad, unless it is by the author, and then inscribed is good, but nearly as good as signed. Unless the inscription is to someone patently important—To my dear Laura, love from Petrarch.”
― Deborah Meyler, The Bookstore