“When the occasional customer tells us his or her dream of running a bookstore someday, we recognize our own naivete in that enthusiasm. They may have some inkling about long hours and low pay, but rarely do they know about the fires, the guerrilla bargainers, the bereavements, or the prisons. Neither did we - then. But we sure do now. In all honesty, the scariest, hardest, saddest, and most important stories found in a bookshop aren't in the books, they're in the customers.”

“The courts have their job to do, and we have ours. Far too often, they get to tell us what to do and when, but the judges know that the line exists, and most stay on their side of it. I’m not about to start giving them the ground that we still own.”

“A customer is the most important visitor on our premises. He is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. He is not an interruption in our work. He is the purpose of it. He is not an outsider in our business. He is part of it. We are not doing him a favor by serving him. He is doing us a favor by giving us an opportunity to do so.”

“We all have our dreams. May we find them, and God have mercy on us when we do.”

“Which comes first, the customer or the designer? Do we make fashion, or does fashion make us? The more we think about the question, the more the answer slips through our fingers.”

“Stories are about secrets. We all have them. Secret dreams, fantasies, hopes and sometimes even desires. Occasionally a dream becomes reality and then maybe there are a million reasons for not telling anybody about it.”