Lewis Buzbee Quotes

I am fatally attracted to all bookstores.

Watching a scene from a film in slow motion is possible, but there's an unreal air to it; reading a passage from a book slowly does nothing to rob the words of their power. A film presents images; a book creates images inside the reader, with the reader's active participation. Books are good for your brain.

The book is a uniquely durable object, one that can be fully enjoyed without being damaged. A book doesn't require fuel, food, or service; it isn't very messy and rarely makes a noise. A book can be read over and over, then passed on to friends, or resold at a garage sale. A book will not crash or freeze and will still work when filled with sand. Even if it falls into the bath, it can be dried out and finished. Books require no special training to operate.

The bookstore and the coffeehouse are natural allies; Neither has a time limit, slowness is encouraged.

Americans ... publish more books than any other country, but the per capita figure is surprisingly low. Of the English-speaking nations, the United States comes in fifth, behind the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. The United Kingdom publishes 2,336 books per person, the United States 545.

November, a dark, rainy Tuesday afternoon. This is my ideal time to be in a bookstore. The shortened light of the afternoon and the idleness and hush of the hour gather everything close, the shelves and the books and the few other customers who graze head-bent in the narrow aisles. There's a clerk at the counter who stares out the front window, taking a breather before the evening rush. I've come to find a book.

How do you press a wildflower into the pages of an e-book?

The books of our childhood offer a vivid door to our own pasts, and not necessarily for the stories we read there, but for the memories of where we were and who we were when we were reading them; to remember a book is to remember the child who read that book.

My bookstore obsession grew to the point where I'd search for new shops during family trips, as though that were the reason for our travel.

For those who are afflicted with book lust, those for whom reading is more than information or escape, the road to our passion is quite simple, paved merely by the presence of the printed matter.
It's a common story; fill in your own blanks:
I was
years old when I happened on a novel called
, and within six months I had read every other book by the writer known as
.

Even a paperback printed on acidic paper, whose pages have yellowed ten years on, can still be read, no matter how badly the spine is cracked or how inflated it's become from being dropped in the bathtub. The pages might separate from the spine, but a rubber band can keep them together. You may loan a book to your circle of closest friends, but shoes are another matter. A great book will never go out of style - books go with every outfit.

For the last several days I've had the sudden and general urge to buy a new book. I've stopped off at a few bookstores around the city, and while I've looked at hundreds and hundreds of books in that time, I have not found the one book that will satisfy my urge. It's not as if I don't have anything to read; there's a tower of perfectly good unread books next to my bed, not to mention the shelves of books in the living room I've been meaning to reread. I find myself, maddeningly, hungry for the next one, as yet unknown. I no longer try to analyze this hunger; I capitulated long ago to the book lust that's afflicted me most of my life. I know enough about the course of the disease to know I'll discover something soon.

Maturity and experience shouldn't stop one from craving silly things like sliding down bannisters.

If you read one book a week, starting at the age of 5, and live to be 80, you will have read a grand total of 3,900 books, a little over one-tenth of 1 percent of the books currently in print.

Books are slow. They require time; they are written slowly, published slowly, and read slowly.

Books, I knew then and now, give body to our ideas and imaginations, make them flesh in the world; a bookstore is the city where our fleshed-out inner selves reside.

It's not as if I don't have anything to read; there's a tower of perfectly good unread books next to my bed, not to mention the shelves of books in the living room I've been meaning to reread. I find myself, maddeningly, hungry for the next one, as yet unknown. I no longer try to analyze this hunger; I capitulated long ago to the book lust that's afflicted me most of my life.