The 27 Best Quotes About Bookshops

Attention book lovers and bookworms! In this post, we share the best quotes about bookshops.

It doesn’t matter is you say bookstores or bookshops. I think we can all agree that we love them. Many of us can’t imagine a world without them.

If you love books and if you love to read, you probably like nothing better than collecting books.

To celebrate National Buy A Book Day, I’ve put together a list of the best quotes about bookshops.

The 27 Best Quotes About Bookshops

1. A good bookshop is not just about selling books from shelves, but reaching out into the world and making a difference. ~David Almond
2. What I say is, a town isn’t a town without a bookstore. It may call itself a town, but unless it’s got a bookstore, it knows it’s not fooling a soul. ~Neil Gaiman, American Gods
3. I love walking into a bookstore. It’s like all my friends are sitting on shelves, waving their pages at me. ~Tahereh Mafi
4. But here, none too soon, are the second-hand bookshops. Here we find anchorage in these thwarting currents of being; here we balance ourselves after the splendours and miseries of the streets. ~Virginia Woolf, Street Haunting
5. The first thing I do in any town I come to is ask if it has a bookstore. ~Robert Frost
6. I stepped into the bookshop and breathed in that perfume of paper and magic that strangely no one had ever thought of bottling. ~Carlos Ruiz Zafón
7. Bookstores are lonely forts, spilling light onto the sidewalk. They civilise their neighbourhoods. ~John Updike
8. Bookshops are places of magical discoveries and the rediscovery of past pleasures. My bookshop, in fact any bookshop, makes me very happy. ~Liane Moriarty
9. Bookshops are my natural habitat. ~Kathy Lette
10. Library books were, I suddenly realised, promiscuous, ready to lie down in the arms of anyone who asked. Not like bookstore books, which married their purchasers, or were brokered for marriages to others. ~Elizabeth McCracken
11. Standing there, staring at the long shelves crammed with books, I felt myself relax and was suddenly at peace. ~Helene Hanff, 84, Charing Cross Road
12. You see, bookshops are dreams built of wood and paper. They are time travel and escape and knowledge and power. They are, simply put, the best of places. ~Jen Campbell, The Bookshop Book
13. I can never leave a bookstore without buying a book. I read four or five at a time. ~Mireille Guiliano
14. Get your friends together, go to your local bookstore and have a book-buying party. ~Roy Blount Jr.
15. My husband claims I have an unhealthy obsession with second-hand bookshops. That I spend too much time daydreaming altogether. But either you intrinsically understand the attraction of searching for hidden treasure amongst rows of dusty shelves or you don’t; it’s a passion, bordering on a spiritual illness, which cannot be explained to the unaffected. ~Kathleen Tessaro, Elegance
16. I am very happy in second-hand bookshops; would a gardener not be happy in a garden? ~Hilary Mantel
17. Aziraphale collected books. If he were totally honest with himself he would have to have admitted that his bookshop was simply somewhere to store them. He was not unusual in this. In order to maintain his cover as a typical second-hand book seller, he used every means short of actual physical violence to prevent customers from making a purchase. Unpleasant damp smells, glowering looks, erratic opening hours – he was incredibly good at it. ~Terry Pratchett, Good Omens
18. A place isn’t a place until it has a bookstore. ~Gabrielle Zevin
19. A bookshop is powder-magazine, a dynamite-shed, a drugstore of poisons, a bar of intoxicants, a den of opiates, an island of sirens. ~John Cowper Powys
20. Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore? ~Henry Ward Beecher
21. Wealth is walking into any bookshop and buying any book you want without looking at the price tag. ~John Waters
22. I believe in the magic of books. I believe that during certain periods in our lives we are drawn to particular books–whether it’s strolling down the aisles of a bookshop with no idea whatsoever of what it is that we want to read and suddenly finding the most perfect, most wonderfully suitable book staring us right in the face. Unblinking. Or a chance meeting with a stranger or friend who recommends a book we would never ordinarily reach for. Books have the ability to find their own way into our lives. ~Cecelia Ahern
23. A bookstore is one of the only pieces of evidence we have that people are still thinking. ~Jerry Seinfeld
24. Bookstores, like libraries, are the physical manifestation of the wide world’s longest, most thrilling conversation. ~Richard Russo
25. I can’t pass a bookstore without slipping inside, looking for the next book that will burn my hand when I touch its jacket, or hand me over a promissory note of such immense power that it contains the formula that will change everything about me. ~Pat Conroy
26. Those of us who read because we love it more than anything, who feel about bookstores the way some people feel about jewellers. ~Anna Quindlen
27. Even an ice cream parlour – a definite advantage – does not alleviate the sorrow I feel for a town lacking a bookstore. ~Natalie Goldberg

The Last Word

I hope you enjoyed these quotes about bookshops. Don’t forgot to support your local independent store.

 by Amanda Patterson

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