Time Was Soft There Quotes

“Hope is a most beautiful drug.”
― Jeremy Mercer, Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co.

“In a place like Paris, the air is so thick with dreams they clog the streets and take all the good tables at the cafés. Poets and writers, models and designers, painters and sculptors, actors and directors, lovers and escapists, they flock to the City of Lights. That night at Polly's, the table spilled over with the rapture of pilgrims who have found their temple. That night, among new friends and safe at Shakespeare and Company, I felt it too. Hope is a most beautiful drug.”
― Jeremy Mercer, Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co.

“In the end, yes, it is a famous bookstore and, yes, it is of no small literary importance. But more than anything, Shakespeare and Company is a refuge, like the church across the river. A place where the owner allows everyone to take what they need and give what they can.”
― Jeremy Mercer, Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co.

“There is something more to this story, something that to this day makes me wonder about the line between coincidence and destiny.”
― Jeremy Mercer, Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co.

“Give what you can, take what you need’—that’s what I always tell people.”
― Jeremy Mercer, Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co.

“One of the great things about the bookstore ... was that people like him were there—writers who'd been around, who weren't necessarily rich or famous, but who had lived sensational lives and made people like Kurt and myself believe that maybe we could, too.”
― Jeremy Mercer, Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co.

“You know, that’s what I’ve always wanted this place to be,” he said. “I look across at Notre Dame and I sometimes think the bookstore is an annex of the church. A place for the people who don’t quite fit in over there.”
― Jeremy Mercer, Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co.

“George then quizzed me about Marx’s funeral. “How many people do you think were there?” he asked. I guessed a few hundred, but George shook his head glumly. Seven. “I don’t know what it all means.” He sighed. “Nobody has the answers. I don’t like people who pretend they do. Life is just the result of a dance of molecules.”
― Jeremy Mercer, Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co.

“As much as we embraced our bohemian life, we were forced to recognize the reality of our predicament: We were all nearly penniless, mostly homeless, and without proper residence papers or health insurance in a foreign country.”
― Jeremy Mercer, Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co.

“You know, if you’re going to be a writer, you have to love life, and there’s nowhere better to love life than Shakespeare and Company,” he told me. “You can meet just about anybody here, you can read books here, you see beautiful women here. Appreciate places like this, because there aren’t enough of them in the world.”
― Jeremy Mercer, Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co.

“The Russian woman who took him to Saint Petersburg but got angry when all he wanted to do was stay home and read the Russian books in her library.”
― Jeremy Mercer, Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co.

“Having lived such an extraordinary life and having run such an extraordinary bookstore, wasn’t he entitled to one last extraordinary love affair?”
― Jeremy Mercer, Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co.

“New love is the greatest drug of all, and he’d been in the Shakespeare and Company vortex for so long, he couldn’t kick the habit. During his fifty years at the bookstore, there had been endless affirmation from women who arrived and fell head over heels for George and the romantic world he’d created. Such a constant rush of love can be dangerously addictive, and George still yearned for it, even at eighty-six years of age.”
― Jeremy Mercer, Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co.

“After that, I put more faith in Chris’s stories. When you see a man holding a machine gun, all of a sudden all his other wild tales become a little more credible.”
― Jeremy Mercer, Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co.

“I’ve always agreed with what Walt Whitman said, that there’s a touch of genius in everyone, that everyone can be special,” George said. “It’s not too late for her. We can help her. It’s the people like this we need to win over.”
― Jeremy Mercer, Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co.

“Simon was transfixed by the fields of yellow flowers. “Those are van Gogh colors,” he said. “You know, in a way, I’m a little like van Gogh—miserably poor, unappreciated in my lifetime.”
― Jeremy Mercer, Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co.

“Before we left, George gave me a brief lesson on packing. He’d traveled the world with only a change of shirt, a toothbrush, and a book in his pocket. What more did you need other than the coat on your back?”
― Jeremy Mercer, Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co.

“George, he explained, always preferred new faces to old friends. Their inevitable infatuation with Shakespeare and Company, the enthusiasm and energy they brought to the store, the tantalizing blank canvas of an unknown person. It wasn’t that the permanent residents of the bookstore fell out of favor; it was just that they were less shiny than the bright new arrivals. George was a man who liked a little shine.”
― Jeremy Mercer, Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co.

“There is a cliché about journalists being frustrated novelists, and perhaps there is some truth to it, because Dave was convinced he could leave business reporting behind and become another Bret Easton Ellis.”
― Jeremy Mercer, Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co.

“Time at Shakespeare and Company was as soft as anything I’d ever felt.”
― Jeremy Mercer, Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co.

“And, it must be said, a final part of it was that like desperate men the world over, I sought salvation in a woman’s arms.”
― Jeremy Mercer, Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co.

“All of this means that the bookstore weaves a thin line between romantic tumble and filthy sty, and the delicate balance is forever endangered by the fact that George’s financial modesty extends to bookstore maintenance.”
― Jeremy Mercer, Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co.

“The bookstore was listed in most every guidebook to Paris and visitors burbled into the store in happy droves. They were intoxicated by the books and the bohemian writers who lived among them, all the time spending large sums of their holiday money.”
― Jeremy Mercer, Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co.

“Many wanted to believe that every writer staying at the bookstore was another Hemingway in order to add that certain flare to their vacation. In truth, of the hundreds of poets and writers who pass through the bookstore every year, only a handful ever publish. But, with such bare pockets, Kurt and I saw no reason why we couldn’t indulge the fantasies.”
― Jeremy Mercer, Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co.

“Blind courage, in my mind, is defined by a man who will stand”
― Jeremy Mercer, Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co.

“The door kept swinging open, the cold air kept rushing in, the absurd questions kept showering down. “Did William Shakespeare really live here?” asked one particularly misinformed customer.”
― Jeremy Mercer, Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co.

“People all tell me they work too much, that they need to make more money,” George told me. “What’s the point? Why not live on as little as possible and then spend your time with your family or reading Tolstoy or running a bookstore? It doesn’t make any sense.”
― Jeremy Mercer, Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co.

“George had discovered money to be the greatest slave master, and by reducing your dependence on it, he believed, you could loosen the grip of a suffocating world.”
― Jeremy Mercer, Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co.

“Watching him live was a daily lesson in parsimony. He would walk miles to save a few francs on green peppers, he bought the barest of staples from the discount grocery stores, he furnished his wardrobe exclusively through church rummage sales. In his kitchen, the same piece of aluminium foil was reused until it was blackened and tattered, while tea was bought in bulk because it was marginally cheaper than buying it in individual bags.”
― Jeremy Mercer, Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co.

“Shakespeare and Company prides itself on being a socialist utopia, but it can’t escape the pressures of a capitalist world. Along with the hotel baron who menaced the bookstore proper, all the residents suffered financial hardships and we wondered how we would survive the gray Paris winter.”
― Jeremy Mercer, Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co.