10 Author Quotes on Bookstores for Independent Bookstore Day
Independent Bookstore Day is coming this Saturday! This national party celebrates the importance of independent bookstores every year on the last Saturday of April. Which means it’s an especially fantastic time to explore the independent bookstores in your area, and many are throwing parties in celebration.
It’s also a great time to remember that independent bookstores are much more than buildings. These non-chain shops are homes for ideas, a growing space for community, and a critical line of support for authors and readers alike.
So in celebration of Independent Bookstore Day, here are 10 authors on their feelings about bookstores:
I love walking into a bookstore. It’s like all my friends are sitting on shelves, waving their pages at me.
—Tahereh Mafi
“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 foolin’ a soul.”
“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
“I always felt, if I can get to a library, I’ll be OK.”
—Maya Angelou
“Browsing through the shelves in bookstores or libraries, I was completely happy.”
—Louis L’Amour
“I have gone to [this bookshop] for years, always finding the one book I wanted—and then three more I hadn’t known I wanted.”
—Mary Ann Shaffer
“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.”
—Lawrence Ferlinghetti
“The Bookshop has a thousand books,
All colors, hues, and tinges,
And every cover is a door
That turns on magic hinges.”
—Nancy Byrd Turner
“To walk into a modern-day bookstore is a little bit like studying a single photograph out of the infinite number of photographs that could be taken of the world: It offers the reader a frame.”
—Nicole Krauss
