Sheridan Hay

“They were oddities, marginal and not exactly respectable. For her part, Chaps was too well read to be considered entirely proper. Books had made her unreasonably independent.”

“I drink to not giving a damn . . .”

“Art opens the fishiest eye . . .”

“drunk on research, exhilarated by arcane details”

“He wanted to limit me to his own investigation of who I was . . .”

“Unlikely things are often true . . .”

“Remember, a book is always a gift.”

“Liberation was in the very scale of the city: a goldfish bowl one could never grow to fit.”

“I loved the city. We were anonymous, and even then I had the sense that cities were yielding; that they moved over and made room.”

“Bruno was a musician with the temperament of an anarchist and the breath of a bartender's dishrag. He gave the lie to bookselling as a genteel occupation.”

“Loneliness is good practice for eternity.”

“I read Borges, Jorge Luis Borges. He think he too good for me, but I love him . . . he was a blind man who see better than anyone”

“Books aren't lumps of paper, but minds on shelves.”

“The books housed in one's first adult bookshelf are the geological bed of who we wish to become”

“...to be free is often to be lonely”

“nothing is ever what you imagine, is it?”

“..the ceiling is just a deep, dusty dome, like the inside of a skull. (Both are vaults, both repositories of knowledge.)”

“I knew books to be objects that loved to cluster and form disordered piles, but here books seemed robbed of their zany capacity to fall about, to conspire. In the library, books behaved themselves.”

“The Arcade, and now Peabody's, combined to tell me that there was life in objects, in books. It was all about having eyes to see the true meaning of things. As Pike proved daily, books held a kind of magic, an apparent as well as a hidden value.”

“It was ugly, but then ugly objects as a general rule are the bravest.”

“Die Bücher, die wie auf unserem ersten Bücherregal als Erwachsene stehen haben, erzählen von unseren Vorhaben.”

“Es waren ausschließlich Männer, diese zwanghaften Buchkäufer und Sammler, die erfüllt waren von der neurotischen Überzeugung, wenn sie es nur einen Tag versäumten, hierherzukommen, könne damit auch ein Buch verloren sein oder zumindest in den Händen eines anderen Käufers landen. Was für ein Leben führten sie? Das Arcade war für sie das erste Ziel des Tages , wo sie rasch vorbeischauten, um einen Blick auf die Neuzugänge zu werfen, die am Fuße von Pikes Plattform aufgestapelt lagen; eine obligatorische, tägliche Suche nach verborgenen Schätzen. Raffgier trieb sie an und Missgunst - die beiden Ingredenzien einer jeden Passion, wie ich vermutete.”

“Drinnen ist das Arcade selbst wie eine große Stadt; wie eine Insel. Dass ein Buchladen ein solcher Ort sein kann, hat man sich immer erhofft, doch das Arcade ist der ursprüngliche Wunsch, der hinter solchen Hoffnungen steckt. Bei jenem ersten Besuch war es, als würde New York hier ganz real. Das Arcade stand für die Menschenmassen, es versinnbildlichte die Großstadt. Die Bücherstapel waren wie die wuselnden New Yorker, unsichtbar in ihren Gebäuden und doch spürbar, Bienen in ihrem Korb.”

“Ageing is a process of exchanging hope for insight”

“I didn't know then that this was how deep emotion most often comes, from opposite directions and at once, when you are least aware and farthest from yourself.”