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The Unknown Unknown: Bookshops and the Delight of Not Getting What You Wanted QUOTES

The Unknown Unknown: Bookshops and the Delight of Not Getting What You Wanted QUOTES

1 " The glamour's off. Almost any question you ask can be answered. It's only the questions that you didn't know to ask that remain, dancing the can-can behind your back. The unknown unknowns. "

― Mark Forsyth , The Unknown Unknown: Bookshops and the Delight of Not Getting What You Wanted

2 " I had to go outside. I had to let the element of chance in. "

― Mark Forsyth , The Unknown Unknown: Bookshops and the Delight of Not Getting What You Wanted

3 " There's always a strange feeling you get when you come across one particular line by chance. It feels somehow significant. That's irrational of course, but humans are irrational creatures. Even the sturdiest, most down-to-earth chap will turn pale if he opens a book at random and sees the words PREPARE TO MEET THY DEATH. "

― Mark Forsyth , The Unknown Unknown: Bookshops and the Delight of Not Getting What You Wanted

4 " Lord, deliver us from what we already knew we wanted. Give us some new desires, the weirder the better. "

― Mark Forsyth , The Unknown Unknown: Bookshops and the Delight of Not Getting What You Wanted

5 " It is, incidentally, a favour that e-books have done for the Good Bookshop: they have made books beautiful again. A few years ago, book covers could be rather drab affairs: the title and the author's name printed over a stock photograph of something Vaguely Relevant. If you wanted to read it, you had to take it as it was. Whereas now, in these new and glorious days when the margins on physical are that little bit higher than on the electrical alternative, publishers produce exquisite bindings. Bookshops haven't been this pretty for at least a century. "

― Mark Forsyth , The Unknown Unknown: Bookshops and the Delight of Not Getting What You Wanted

6 " Tolstoy, Stendhal and Cervantes, these men follow me around. They stand in dark corners and eye me disapprovingly from beneath supercilious eyebrows. And all because I’ve never got round to reading their blasted, thousand-page, three-ton, five-generation, state-of-a-nation thingummywhatsits. I don’t care. Or rather, sometimes I do, and at other times I remember that I’m a tortoise-slow reader and that there’s a pub just around the corner. "

― Mark Forsyth , The Unknown Unknown: Bookshops and the Delight of Not Getting What You Wanted

7 " The internet is a splendid invention, and it won’t go away. If you know you want something, the internet can get it for you. My point, and the whole point of this essay, is that it’s not enough to get what you already know you wanted. The best things are the things you never knew you wanted until you got them. "

― Mark Forsyth , The Unknown Unknown: Bookshops and the Delight of Not Getting What You Wanted

8 " Half of the art of bookselling is about choosing what not to have in your shop. It is not enough to have good books, you must not have bad books. "

― Mark Forsyth , The Unknown Unknown: Bookshops and the Delight of Not Getting What You Wanted

9 " Almost any question you ask can be answered. It’s only the questions that you didn’t know to ask that remain, dancing the can-can behind your back. The unknown unknowns. "

― Mark Forsyth , The Unknown Unknown: Bookshops and the Delight of Not Getting What You Wanted

10 " Computers are machines. The internet is, ultimately, a huge army of machines. And machines do not allow in the element of chance. They do exactly what you tell them to do. So the internet means that, though you get what you already knew you wanted, you’ll never get anything more. "

― Mark Forsyth , The Unknown Unknown: Bookshops and the Delight of Not Getting What You Wanted