bookstores

You are more likely to find three TVs inside a randomly selected house than you are to find a single book that is or was not read to pass an exam, to please God, or to be a better cook.

...bookstores, libraries... they're the closest thing I have to a church.

There is a value to books__nhackable, paper books__hat measures far beyond mere ink and paper.

Books on the bookshelvesAnd stacked on the floorBooks kept in basketsAnd propped by the doorBooks in neat pilesAnd in disarrayBooks tucked in closetsAnd books on displayBooks filling cranniesAnd books packed in nooksBooks massed in windowsAnd mounded in crooksLibraries beckonAnd bookstores inviteBut book-filled rooms welcomeUs back home at night!

I remember as a very young child being warned that libraries and bookstores were quiet places where noise wasn__ allowed. Here was yet another thing the adults had gotten wrong, for these book houses pulsed with sounds; they just weren__ noisy. The books hummed. The collective noise they made was like riding on a large boat where the motor__ steady thrum and tickle vibrated below one__ sneakers, ignorable until you listened, then omnipresent and relentless, the sound that carried you forward. Each book brimmed with noises it wanted to make inside your head the moment you opened it; only the shut covers prevented it from shouting ideas, impulses, proverbs, and plots into that sterile silence.

Today is the first day in history.-One of Nathan's Daily GemsFrom the 'Book Store ON Main Street'Seal Beach, CA

Interlibrary loans are a wonder of the world and a glory of civilization. Libraries really are wonderful. They__e better than bookshops, even. I mean bookshops make a profit on selling you books, but libraries just sit there lending you books quietly out of the goodness of their hearts.

I had a friend once who looked at his library and discovered that even if he completely stopped filmmaking (he was a filmmaker too) and just decided to read the books he had in his library, it would take him until he was 100 years old. He was a little bit panicked. But he was courageous. He went out of his house. He went to the bookstore. And he bought ten books.

Books are more to treasure than cars.

I am lost in the world of books. So many books to read.

Don't patronize the chain bookstores. Every time I see some author scheduled to read and sign his books at a chain bookstore, I feel like telling him he's stabbing the independent bookstores in the back.

Walking into a bookshop is a depressing thing. It__ not the pretentious twats, browsing books as part of their desirable lifestyle. It__ not the scrubby members of staff serving at the counter: the pseudo-hippies and fucking misfits. It__ not the stink of coffee wafting out from somewhere in the building, a concession to the cult of the coffee bean. No, it__ the books. I could ignore the other shit, decide that maybe it didn__ matter too much, that when consumerism meets culture, the result is always going to attract wankers and everything that goes with them. But the books, no, they__e what make your stomach sink and that feeling of dark syrup on the brain descend. Look around you, look at the shelves upon shelves of books _ for years, the vessels of all knowledge. We__e part of the new world now, but books persist. Cheap biographies, pulp fiction; glossy covers hiding inadequate sentiments. Walk in and you__e surrounded by this shit _ to every side a reminder that we don__ want stimulation anymore, we want sedation. Fight your way through the celebrity memoirs, pornographic cook books, and cheap thrills that satisfy most and you get to the second wave of vomit-inducing product: offerings for the inspired and arty. Matte poetry books, classics, the finest culture can provide packaged and wedged into trendy coverings, kidding you that you__e buying a fashion accessory, not a book. But hey, if you can stomach a trip further into the shop, you hit on the meatier stuff _ history, science, economics _ provided they can stick __op._ in front of it, they__l stock it. Pop. psychology, pop. art, pop. life. It__ the new world _ we don__ want serious anymore, we want nuggets of almost-useful information. Books are the past, they__e on the out. Information is digital now; bookshops, they__e somewhere between gallery and museum.

Your reciept is your library card." -- On what killed the brick and mortar bookstores.

Readership is highly dependent upon format and distribution as much as it is on content.

Wherever I go, bookstores are still the closest thing to a town square.

People open bookstores because they want their souls back.(from "Two Women" published in Do Me: Tales of Sex & Love from Tin House)

What is the sweetness of flowers compared to the savour of dust and confinement?

Between my first book tour, in 2003, and the next one, in 2009, many of the places I visited had undergone a significant transformation or vanished: Cody__ in Berkeley, seven branch libraries in Philadelphia, twelve of the fourteen bookstores in Harvard Square, Harry W. Schwartz in Milwaukee and, in my own hometown of Washington, D.C., Olsson__ and Chapters.