Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore
Matthew J. Sullivan
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Something’s wrong in the air, you know, when a book costs less than a bullet. Or a Coke. Values-wise.”
“If you want to pay respects, by the way, he's at the zoo." "At the zoo? As in the zoo?" "Joey liked to walk the zoo on free days. I didn't know where else to put him. I thought about leaving him on a shelf upstairs, with Flannery or Fante or Rimbaud. But I figured there were rules against leaving bodies in here." "Probably." "So I put his ashes in a duffel bag and snipped a tiny hole in the bottom and walked the length of the zoo. But I didn't make the hole big enough so there were these tiny pieces left over in the bag. I shook them into the grass. But then all the geese thought he was bread crumbs and started charging me. Horrifying, Lydia, the way they gobbled him up. A frenzy. Joey would've abhorred all the attention.”
“All words are masks, and the lovelier they are, the more they are meant to conceal. —Steven Millhauser, “August Eschenburg” As”
“Libraries were havens for everyone, he might've told her, not just the clean and productive.”
“To the inexperienced, many BookFrogs appeared as derelict or homeless, but to the seasoned eye it was clear that they’d shed themselves of the world, rejecting its costumes and rules in favor of paper and words.”
“Lydia sometimes saw Plath as the woman she might someday become: caring, creative, content—but inaccessible to nearly everyone alive.”
“You leave yourself open to answers, he’d always taught her. You keep turning pages, you finish chapters, you find the next book. You seek and you seek and you seek, and no matter how tough things become, you never settle.”
“Lydia had learned early on at Bright Ideas that stepping back here ensured an amplification of both intelligence and surliness. Many of her backstage comrades were bibliophiles who’d been so disappointed by people that they now sought as little human interaction as possible.”
“.....he'd spent his whole life trying in vain to find a place that, for him, was never allowed to exist.”
“one of the kinder nuns had lauded Carol for how original she was in her sinfulness, as if God had yet to announce the commandments that she was breaking every day.”
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Book Keywords:
death, ashes, zoo
