Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore Quotes

“Something’s wrong in the air, you know, when a book costs less than a bullet. Or a Coke. Values-wise.”
― Matthew J. Sullivan, Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore

“All words are masks, and the lovelier they are, the more they are meant to conceal. —Steven Millhauser, “August Eschenburg” As”
― Matthew J. Sullivan, Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore

“Libraries were havens for everyone, he might've told her, not just the clean and productive.”
― Matthew J. Sullivan, Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore

“If you want to pay respects, by the way, he's at the zoo."
"At the zoo? As in the zoo?"
"Joey liked to walk the zoo on free days. I didn't know where else to put him. I thought about leaving him on a shelf upstairs, with Flannery or Fante or Rimbaud. But I figured there were rules against leaving bodies in here."
"Probably."
"So I put his ashes in a duffel bag and snipped a tiny hole in the bottom and walked the length of the zoo. But I didn't make the hole big enough so there were these tiny pieces left over in the bag. I shook them into the grass. But then all the geese thought he was bread crumbs and started charging me. Horrifying, Lydia, the way they gobbled him up. A frenzy. Joey would've abhorred all the attention.”
― Matthew J. Sullivan, Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore

“You leave yourself open to answers, he’d always taught her. You keep turning pages, you finish chapters, you find the next book. You seek and you seek and you seek, and no matter how tough things become, you never settle.”
― Matthew J. Sullivan, Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore

“To the inexperienced, many BookFrogs appeared as derelict or homeless, but to the seasoned eye it was clear that they’d shed themselves of the world, rejecting its costumes and rules in favor of paper and words.”
― Matthew J. Sullivan, Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore

“Lydia sometimes saw Plath as the woman she might someday become: caring, creative, content—but inaccessible to nearly everyone alive.”
― Matthew J. Sullivan, Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore

“Lydia had learned early on at Bright Ideas that stepping back here ensured an amplification of both intelligence and surliness. Many of her backstage comrades were bibliophiles who’d been so disappointed by people that they now sought as little human interaction as possible.”
― Matthew J. Sullivan, Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore

“Joey loved it here,” he said. “Loved it. This place gave him something sacred. Gave his mind some quiet. This was his Thanksgiving table. His couch-cushion fort. He could get lost in here like nowhere else on earth. I’m telling you this, Lydia, because in all his life, he’d never really had that feeling before, not consistently anyway. Not to overstate it, but this store was the closest thing to a home that Joey ever had.”
― Matthew J. Sullivan, Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore

“.....he'd spent his whole life trying in vain to find a place that, for him, was never allowed to exist.”
― Matthew J. Sullivan, Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore

“She was all about silencing the past.”
― Matthew J. Sullivan, Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore

“one of the kinder nuns had lauded Carol for how original she was in her sinfulness, as if God had yet to announce the commandments that she was breaking every day.”
― Matthew J. Sullivan, Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore

“Something’s wrong in the air, you know, when a book costs less than a bullet. Or a Coke. Values-wise. Lydia”
― Matthew J. Sullivan, Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore

“He was born to disappear.”
― Matthew J. Sullivan, Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore

“Your heart? Sweetie, you’ve got too much heart. Do yourself a favor and let it shrivel. Read some Henry Miller. Some Ayn Rand. Some Deepak Chopra. That’ll shitten your outlook.”
― Matthew J. Sullivan, Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore

“This place gave him something sacred. Gave his mind some quiet. This was his Thanksgiving table. His couch-cushion fort.”
― Matthew J. Sullivan, Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore

“and sensed a side of him that she’d been happy to ignore before—that of a solemn, desperate boy whose very desperation made people want to avoid him.”
― Matthew J. Sullivan, Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore

“If I was going to kill myself,” Plath continued, “I’d leave a note just to get a few last digs in. Insult the guy who took me to prom. Give my parents one last guilt trip. Criticize my ex-husband’s penis. Make it count, you know? It’s not like you’d have anything to lose.”
― Matthew J. Sullivan, Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore

“It’s quite a library, anyway,” she said, trying to sound upbeat. “I’ve begun to think of it as more graveyard than library. End of the line, you know. Where book-of-the-month club comes to die.” As”
― Matthew J. Sullivan, Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore

“trying to return to a time in his life that was forever out of reach.”
― Matthew J. Sullivan, Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore

“Why do they have to use black bags for bodies anyway? No wonder everyone’s afraid of death. Why not teal?”
― Matthew J. Sullivan, Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore

“Listen. I guess I’m telling you that your presence on this planet is requested, okay?”
― Matthew J. Sullivan, Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore

“Something’s wrong in the air, you know, when a book costs less than a bullet.”
― Matthew J. Sullivan, Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore

“Joey’s heart was already broken,” Lydia said, “and you broke it again. He couldn’t recover this time.”
― Matthew J. Sullivan, Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore

“—Don’t call me that. It’s not your fault, but some people are just not meant to be born. If I could undo you, I would. I promise you, I would.”
― Matthew J. Sullivan, Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore

“but, you know, maybe you should talk to someone, go sit in a circle of fold-up chairs in the basement of some church and drink coffee from a Styrofoam cup.”
― Matthew J. Sullivan, Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore

“Okay, fine. He was going through something, as we all do sometimes, and I was his friend, so I would stay at his side because that’s what you do.”
― Matthew J. Sullivan, Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore

“Lydia sighed in agreement. Joey touched the book between them, a gentle finger-tap. —These things saved my life, he said, in nearly a whisper. That’s no small thing. —You’re not alone there. —See, people say that all the time but for me they really did.”
― Matthew J. Sullivan, Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore

“her recommendation—Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, freshly annotated; Alice Munro’s Open Secrets; Denis Johnson’s Resuscitation of a Hanged Man; Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love; Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy—and the sight of each made her sigh.”
― Matthew J. Sullivan, Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore

“Maybe just peace of mind. You won’t get it but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth seeking.”
― Matthew J. Sullivan, Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore