Death of a Bookseller Quotes

“Reading is a way of life for some customers, the kind of customers who buy more than they read, who behave as though ‘bookworm’ is as inherent as their blood type or their astrological sign.”
― Alice Slater, Death of a Bookseller

“Bookshops are oceans and sections are like tides, they grow and they shrink, they grow and the shrink. It depends on the season and what's selling and what new trends are emerging. Scandi Noir, Dystopian YA, Adult Coloring In, Hygge. It only takes one bestseller to start a tsunami of copycats. Just as you think the swell is here to stay, sales start to taper off and the bookshop breathes and contracts and swallows whatever stock didn't sell, reabsorbs it back into the master section, back into crime or YA or crafts and we rearrange everything to fill the gap until the next trend gains momentum. A good bookseller can sense when the tides are turning, when sales are starting to wane. A bad bookseller doesn't adapt to change, will cling to those declining sales instead of embracing the next big thing. A really bad bookseller will favor their personal taste over customer interest.”
― Alice Slater, Death of a Bookseller

“While I'm in the shop, I dream of all the things I could be doing if I were at home, cleaning my flat, reading the stack of unread books by my bed, cracking on with the poem I'd started back in September, but when my days off come around, I waste them in bed on my phone, scrolling and scrolling and scrolling, and stalking Eli's girlfriend. I'd planned to start writing something that I'd been thinking about for a while, something about my mother, but everything feels soupy, my body a great weight I have to drag around my flat. I never have the energy when I have the time and I never have the time when I have the energy.”
― Alice Slater, Death of a Bookseller

“I just wish I could have found my way here without throwing petrol over my entire life and setting it on fire.’ ‘You had to rest at rock bottom,’ she replied, ‘to gather the strength to swim back up to the surface.”
― Alice Slater, Death of a Bookseller

“It was a high-profile case and . . . I just hate that my trauma is tied to this horrible story, and I can’t talk about one without talking about the other. I hate that her name will forever be associated with the man who killed her, and I hate that the world only remembers her as a chapter in the story of his life.”
― Alice Slater, Death of a Bookseller

“There’s no resolution to grief, no happy ending. It’s a clock that never stops ticking, a day that never ends.”
― Alice Slater, Death of a Bookseller

“You had to rest at rock bottom,’ she replied, ‘to gather the strength to swim back up to the surface.”
― Alice Slater, Death of a Bookseller

“every dish tasted like a microwaved sanitary towel smothered in regurgitated mozzarella.”
― Alice Slater, Death of a Bookseller

“William Morris: have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.”
― Alice Slater, Death of a Bookseller

“The kind of people who have a favourite serial killer, who buy true crime merch and watch documentaries about death over dinner, who visit places where terrible things have happened like they’re going to Disneyland: Chernobyl. Alcatraz. Fukushima.”
― Alice Slater, Death of a Bookseller

“The dog looks up and grins in that peculiar way that Staffies do.”
― Alice Slater, Death of a Bookseller

“Those Pumpkin Spice Girls. Garden centre girls who filled their flats with macramé and air plants.”
― Alice Slater, Death of a Bookseller

“They were the kind of girls who felt a shiver of excitement as summer gave way to autumn, when Starbucks launched their seasonal menu, and it was time to wear scarves, tights and leather boots. Pumpkin Spice Girls loved true crime podcasts these days.”
― Alice Slater, Death of a Bookseller

“I reread her words like a prayer, like a psalm, like a letter from a lover at war.”
― Alice Slater, Death of a Bookseller

“Somewhere between the ink that’s printed on each page and my understanding of the content is a plain across which my mother’s mind has also wandered, and that landscape exists in every single edition, whether or not it has been touched by my mother’s hand. That’s the power of reading.”
― Alice Slater, Death of a Bookseller

“You had to rest at rock bottom,” she replied, “to gather the strength to swim back up to the surface.”
― Alice Slater, Death of a Bookseller

“I loved the idea of poetry—loved the easy messiness of it, the darkness of it, the way anyone could slap words together and call it a poem”
― Alice Slater, Death of a Bookseller

“I don’t like feeling insufficiently informed about things.”
― Alice Slater, Death of a Bookseller

“it was like a switch was flipped and I was somewhere else, deep in the dungeon of my mind, lost in some depraved thought.”
― Alice Slater, Death of a Bookseller

“My life really started when I gave up trying to fit in, when I settled into myself, like an alligator sinking into a swamp.”
― Alice Slater, Death of a Bookseller

“As a teenager, nestling in my resentment for normies was a simmering desperation to fit in.”
― Alice Slater, Death of a Bookseller

“It was lonely, but books made good company.”
― Alice Slater, Death of a Bookseller

“I can tell you’re not listening. Listen to this bit,’ he says. ‘Listen properly. I really want this to be special.’ It takes me a second to realise he’s not talking about the evening, or the proximity of our bodies, but of my experience listening to Dark Side of the Moon.”
― Alice Slater, Death of a Bookseller

“You alright, yeah?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘Did you come?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘Sick.”
― Alice Slater, Death of a Bookseller

“I fold the pages, bend the covers, stuff them in my handbag, cover them in greasy fingerprints, in coffee, in wine, in bathwater. I lose them, lend them out, give them away. It’s not that I mean to be careless, but the reverence I have for books only extends to the words on the page, the magic between the lines. I think that’s why I’m such a good bookseller. I’m selling things, artefacts, objets, yes. But that’s not all. I’m also selling magic.”
― Alice Slater, Death of a Bookseller

“It’s the words that have power. Somewhere between the ink that’s printed on each page and my understanding of the content is a plain across which my mother’s mind has also wandered, and that landscape exists in every single edition, whether or not it has been touched by my mother’s hand. That’s the power of reading.”
― Alice Slater, Death of a Bookseller

“By the time the first customer arrives, the sun has disappeared behind the old department store, and the light is back to its usual dishwater, and no one sees its gentle fade from amber to yellow to grey but me.”
― Alice Slater, Death of a Bookseller

“I would appear at the pub in odd times, ramshackle with dried jam around my mouth, a grimy neck, hair in disarray, a smell of unwashed clothes about me - a little animal, stuffed into leggings and tshirts that never quite fit me right because I wasn't built the way little girls were meant to be built.”
― Alice Slater, Death of a Bookseller

“... but books made good company. My favorites were the Point Horror series, because I desperately wanted to be a teenager. I understood that that was when you really started living and being an American Teenager appeared to come with a certain glamour. When I was a kid it seemed that everything good happened in America. Like cheerleading and yearbooks and proms, Satanism and the Manson family. I pictured myself hanging out at the mall, at the drive-in, at the ice skating rink with friends with names like Stacy & Chuck and one of them would be murdered.”
― Alice Slater, Death of a Bookseller

“When I saw you lying on the kitchen floor, I thought you were dead, Lau. If you hadn’t knocked on your neighbour’s door the night before, we might never have found you in time. It was a miracle.”
― Alice Slater, Death of a Bookseller