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1 " 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. "
― Nina George , The Little Paris Bookshop
2 " It takes only one word to hurt a woman, a matter of seconds, one stupid, impatient blow of the crop. But winning back her trust takes years. And sometimes there isn't the time. "
3 " Whenever Monsieur Perdu looked at a book, he did not see it purely in terms of a story, retail price and an essential balm for the soul; he saw freedom on wings of paper. "
4 " Oh, merciless freedom, you continue to overwhelm me! You demand that I challenge myself and feel ashamed, and yet continue to feel so outrageously proud to live a life full of my desires. "
5 " [Women] are superior beings to us men. When they love us, then they are being gracious, for only rarely do we give them reason to love us. I learned that from your mother, and she's right. Sad to say, she's right. "
6 " There are women who only look at another woman's shoes and never at her face.And others who always look women in the face and only occasionally at their shoes. "
7 " His reading aloud was constantly improving, and histories were more like radio plays. Perdu suspected that these small children, listening with eyes wide and in rapt concentration, would one day grow up to need reading, with an accompanying sense of wonder and the feeling of having a film running inside your head, as much as they needed air to breathe. "
8 " Reading makes you impudent. Oh yes, unknown father, so it does. "
9 " I don't know how many years it's been since I last slept with my husband. I was faithful, stupid and so awfully lonely that I'll gobble you up if you're nice to me. Or kill you because I can't bear it. "
10 " What a hideous life he had chosen, how painful was the loneliness he endured because he didn't have the courage to trust someone again. To trust someone entirely because in love there is no other way. "
11 " We are loved if we love, another truth we always seem to forget. ...Loving requires so much courage and so little expectation. "
12 " Often it’s not we who shape words, but the words we use that shape us. "
13 " I'm looking for what I was capable of before... Or to be more precise, I'm trying to see whether I'm still capable of it. "
14 " And slowly, infinitely slowly, he began to trust. Not the sea, from from it; no one should make that mistake! "
15 " And yes, being lovesick is like being in mourning. Because you die, because your future dies and you with it...There is a hurting time. It lasts for so long. But it gets better. I know that now. "
16 " It's amazing how close you are to your essential self as a kid, he thought, and how far from it you drift the more you strive to be loved. "
17 " ...having a child is like casting off your own childhood forever. It's as if it's only then that you really grasp what it means to be a man. You're scared too that all your weaknesses will be laid bare, because fatherhood demands more than you can give.... I always felt I had to earn your love, because I loved you so, so much. "
18 " Time. It rubs the rough edges that hurt us smooth. "
19 " When the stars imploded billions of years ago, iron and silver, gold and carbon came raining down. And the iron from that stardust is in us today-in our mitochondria. Mothers pass on the stars and their iron to their children. Who knows, Jean, you and I might be made of the dust from one and the same star, and maybe we recognized each other by its light. We were searching for each other. We are star seekers. "
20 " It looked as though [the stars] were breathing to some never-ending slow, deep rhythm. They breathed & watched as the world came & went. ...For them, the earth was one more island world in the immeasurable ocean of outer space, its inhabitants microscopically small "
