It wasn’t even 8:00 yet. Pretty early for such deep thoughts.
It’s sad when you think about it, but also kind of beautiful.
Should have. Would have. Could have. Didn’t.
Daddy always said the only thing worth begging for was your life, but maybe he was wrong. Maybe sometimes your love is a little bit worth begging for, too.
It’s a weakness to apologize before hearing what the other person’s grievances are. You don’t want to end up creating new grievances where there were none to begin with. Another Daddy-ism, if you hadn’t already guessed.
Tragedy is when someone ends up dead. Everything else is just a bump in the road. For the record, that was something Daddy used to say.
My heart was a little bit broken, but I still had to go to school. I buttoned my dress shirt over it and my winter coat, too. I hoped it didn’t show too much.
And when she dreams, she dreams of a girl who was lost at sea but one day found the shore.
I met a travler from an ancient land.
Saying you’re through with romance is like saying you’re done with living, Betty. Life is better with a little romance, you know.
I let myself feel good and sorry for myself, but only for a second. Daddy always said that the most useless of all human emotions was self-pity.
Maybe if I’d been braver in that moment, I would have cried.
It is the secret fear that we are unlovable that isolates us,” the passage goes, “but it is only because we are isolated that we think we are unlovable. Someday, you do not know when, you will be driving down a road. And someday, you do not know when, he, or indeed she, will be there. You will be loved because for the first time in your life, you will truly not be alone. You will have chosen to not be alone.
Our moment had passed somehow. I was different. He was, too. Without our “madness” to unite us, there wasn’t anything much there. Or maybe too much had happened in too short a time. It’s like when you take a trip with someone you don’t know very well. Sometimes you can get very close very quickly, but then after the trip is over, you realise all that was a false sort of closeness. An intimacy based on the trip more than the travellers, if that makes any sense.
Every book is a world.
There’s something kind of heroic about being a bookseller.
Liz looks at the tissue box, which is decorated with drawings of snowmen engaged in various holiday activities. One of the snowmen is happily placing a smiling rack of gingerbread men in an oven. Baking gingerbread men, or any cooking for that matter, is probably close to suicide for a snowman, Liz thinks. Why would a snowman voluntarily engage in an activity that would in all likelihood melt him? Can snowmen even eat? Liz glares at the box.
There ain’t nobody in the world like book people. It’s a business of gentlemen and gentlewomen.
A good marriage is, at least, one part conspiracy.
A place is not really a place without a bookstore.