The Little Paris Bookshop
by Nina George
translated by Simon Pare
(Abacus, 2015)
Memories are like wolves. You can’t lock them away and hope they leave you along.
Page 4.
You only really get to know your husband when he walks out on you.
Page 6.
Sometimes you’re swimming in unwept tears and you’ll go under if you store them up inside.
Page 9.
What you read is more important in the long term than the man you marry.
Page 11.
Simply because a book has aged a bit doesn’t mean it’s gone bad.
Page 12.
Books keep stupidity at bay. And vain hopes. And vain men. They undress you with love, strength and knowledge. It’s love from within.
Page 13.
A stupid man is every woman’s downfall.
Page 19.
The further life advanced, the more protective the elderly were of their good days: nothing should imperil the time they had left.
Page 19.
There is so much to say about living. Living with books, living with children, living for beginners.
Page 21.
It was a common misconception that bookseller looked after books.
They look after people.
Page 22.
A book is both medic and medicine at once. It makes a diagnosis as well as offering therapy. Putting the right novels to the appropriate ailments: that’s how I sell books.
Page 27.
An old rule of bookselling: never talk to authors aobut books by other writers.
Page 28.
Anyone who’s good at something is hated - or not loved in any case.
Page 31.
Listening in silence was essential to making a comprehensive scan of a person’s soul.
Page 33.
The texture of the things a person loves rubs off on his or her language.
Page 35.
Women always felt guiltier than they ought.
Page 36.
Often it’s not we who shape words, but h words we use that shape us.
Page 36.
Promises - women always want promises.
Page 56.
I miss you.
I miss myself.
I no longer know who I am.
Page 57.
Love may come and go, but the caring goes on.
Page 59.
When women stop loving, men fall into a void of their own making.
Page 61.
Love couldn’t stop a woman wishing to string up her husband because he was a serious pain in the neck.
Page 62.
We turn peculiar when we don’t have anyone left to love.
Page 79.
The soul sometimes needs to cry to be happy.
Page 89.
Every woman wants to net herself a man and turn his icy defenses into passion.
Page 94.
Diets obviously make you hallucinate.
Page 94.
If in doubt, always endure alone.
Page 96.
Homesickness is lovesickness, only worse.
Page 96.
Women are the smart ones, because they didn’t oppose feeling and thinking, and loved without limits.
Page 100.
We cannot decide to love. We cannot compel anyone to love us. There’s no secret recipe, only love itself. And we are at its mercy - there’s nothing we can do.
Page 115.
Nothing cools anger like a nice splatter book, where the blood almost spurts off the page.
Page 119.
Nobody would ever wise up if they hadn’t at some stage been young and stupid.
Page 120.
Never listen to fear! Fear makes you stupid!
Page 122.
It seemed inconceivable to young men that women could drive you to despair. Growing elder and gaining deeper knowledge of women only made things worse.
Page 124.
Death means nothing … We’ll forever be what we once were for each other.
Page 127.
Not bad is good enough.
Page 128.
Small love. Big Love. Wasn’t it terrible that love came in several sizes?
Page 128.
A bookseller never forgets that books are a very recent means of expression in the broad sweep of history, capable of changing the world and toppling tyrants.
Page 133.
Dreams are thee interface between the worlds, between time and space.
Page 137.
Love doesn’t need to be restricted to one person to be true.
Page 147.
To be free is to lose one’s certainty.
Page 150.
I am my body.
Page 154.
Tango is a truth drug. It lays bare your problems and your complexes, but also the strengths you hide form others so as not to vex them. It shows what a couple can be for each other, how they can listen to each other. People who only want to listen to themselves will hate tango.
Page 156.
Only the pure and the free may say, ‘I love you.’
Page 158.
You have to dance the things you cannot explain.
Page 163.
You have to write the things you cannot express.
Page 164.
I always imagine that anything interesting is female.
Page 171.
Aromas do funny things to the soul.
Page 173.
If you don’t take risks, life will pass you by.
Page 175.
Reading makes you beautiful, reading makes you rich, reading makes you slim!
Page 176.
Women tell you more about the world. Men only tell you about themselves.
Page 179.
It’s well known that reading makes people impudent.
Page 180.
A novel is like a garden where the reader must spend time in order to bloom.
Page 180.
Rivers are not like the sea. The sea demands, while rivers give.
Page 181.
He felt as if there were stone tears inside him that left no room for anything else.
Page 184.
Love’s follies are the sweetest. But you pay most dearly for them.
Pages 184-185.
I think death’s politically overrated.
Page 187.
Loving is a verb, so … do it.
Page 188.
To carry them within us - that is our task. We carry them all inside us, all our dead and shattered loves. Only they make us whole. If we begin to forget or cast aside those we’ve lost, then … then we are no longer present either.
Page 209.
All the love, all the dead, all the people we’ve known. They are the rivers that feed our sea of souls. If we refuse to remember them, that sea will dry up too.
Page 209.
Asking questions is an art.
Page 227.
Most people only ask question so they can listen to themselves talk. Or hear something they are able to cope with, but please, nothing that might get the better of them.
Page 227.
The right questions can make a person very happy.
Page 227.
Do we decide only in retrospect that we’ve been happy? Don’t we notice when we’re happy, or do we realise only much later that we were?
Page 233.
We are loved if we love.
Page 234.
Isn’t it amazing how physical love is? Our body is better at recalling what it felt like to touch someone than our brain is at remembering the things that person said.
Page 233.
I wish you’d wake up and save me.
Page 241.
Pain makes the body dull and your mind with it.
Page 244.
I feel crushed by the eternity that awaits me.
Page 246.
Pain was the path to joy.
Page 264.
Remain silent about the dead, and they’ll never leave you in peace.
Page 265.
Some of us love particularly well; others look after lovers particularly well.
Page 274.
There’s a halfway world between each ending and each new beginning? It’s called the hurting time … . It’s a bog; it’s where your dreams and worries and forgotten plans gather.
Page 275.
The sea was the first thing he had found that was large enough to absorb his sorrow.
Page 281.
Food and books were closely related.
Page 285.
He was a man caught between darkness and light. You become someone else when your loved ones die.
Page 286.
Being lovesick is like being in mourning. Because you die, because your future dies and you with it.
Page 289.
Books can do many things, but not everything. We have to live the important things, not read them.
Page 291.
The reality of love is better than its reputation.
Page 294.
The older you get the more you feel like being with someone you can talk to and laugh with.
Page 297.
The more important a thing is, the slower it should be done.
Page 303.
Life is never easy, and there are a thousand ways to live it.
Page 320.
Pain makes a man stupid. And a stupid man is more easily afraid.
Page 325.
Shouldn’t we carry on living the same way until the last, because that is what vexes death the most - to see us drinking life to the final draught?
Page 226.
Death doesn’t matter.
It makes no difference to life.
We will always remain what we were to one another.
Page 227.
The advantage of dying is that you stop being afraid of it. There is a sense of peacefulness too.
Page 333.
Everybody has an inner room where demons lurk. Only when we open it and face up to it are we free.
Page 338.
Culture is the result of teamwork, and a lone writer will never be as good as her back-up team.
Page 358.
Books help me breathe better.
Page 359.