Bright Ideas: A Record of Invention and Misinvention

“Something’s wrong in the air, you know, when a book costs less than a bullet. Or a Coke. Values-wise.””

— Unknown

“All words are masks, and the lovelier they are, the more they are meant to conceal.”

— Unknown

“Libraries were havens for everyone, he might've told her, not just the clean and productive.””

— Unknown

“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.””

— Unknown

“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.””

— Unknown

“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.””

— Unknown

“Lydia sometimes saw Plath as the woman she might someday become: caring, creative, content”

— Unknown

“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.””

— Unknown

“Joey loved it here,” he said. “Loved it. This place gave him something sacred. Gave his mind some quiet. This was his Thanksgiving table. His couch-cushion fort. He could get lost in here like nowhere else on earth. I’m telling you this, Lydia, because in all his life, he’d never really had that feeling before, not consistently anyway. Not to overstate it, but this store was the closest thing to a home that Joey ever had.””

— Unknown