Summer was over, and we were no longer young, but there were great things before us.
The beauty of being a bookseller is that you don’t have to be a literary critic: all you have to do to books is enjoy them.
Overhead the night was a superb arch of clear frost, sifted with stars.
Life’s a lot different from what people pretend. That’s why pretending is fun. I used to think it was some special wickedness of my own that made such queer things happen. Now I’m beginning to guess that everybody’s like that.
When you sell a man a book you don’t sell just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue – you sell him a whole new life. Love and friendship and humour and ships at sea by night – there’s all heaven and earth in a book, a real book.
Big shots are only little shots who keep shooting.
Everywhere, as we go about our small business, we must discern the fingerprints of the gigantic plan, the orderly and inexorable routine with neither beginning nor end, in which death is but a preface to another birth, and birth the certain forerunner of another death.
There is only one success – to be able to spend your life in your own way.
In every man’s heart there is a secret nerve that answers to the vibrations of beauty.
Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking.
There are three ingredients in the good life: learning, earning and yearning.
High heels were invented by a woman who had been kissed on the forehead.
No one appreciates the very special genius of your conversation as the dog does.
If you have to keep reminding yourself of a thing, perhaps it isn’t so.
Heavy hearts, like heavy clouds in the sky, are best relieved by the letting of a little water.
The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets.
There is indeed a heaven on this earth, a heaven which we inhabit when we read a good book.
A human being: an ingenious assembly of portable plumbing.
A man who has never made a woman angry is a failure in life.
The courage of the poet is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness.