Seattle Mystery Bookshop Books & Decay

When life descends into the pit
I must become my own candle
Willingly burning my self
To light up the darkness around me.

Alice Walker

-Seattle Mystery Bookshop

Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.

The Book of Disquiet

-Seattle Mystery Bookshop

The greatest need of our time is to clean out the enormous mass of mental and emotional rubbish that clutters our minds.

Thomas Merton

-Seattle Mystery Bookshop

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow-
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand-
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep- while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

Poe

-Seattle Mystery Bookshop

I’ve always rejected being understood. To be understood is to prostitute oneself. I prefer to be taken seriously for what I’m not, remaining humanly unknown, with naturalness and all due respect.

Pessoa

-Seattle Mystery Bookshop

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.

Kierkegaard

-Seattle Mystery Bookshop

The splendor of the rose and the whiteness of the lily
do not rob the little violet of it’s scent nor the daisy of its simple charm.
If every tiny flower wanted to be a rose, spring would lose its loveliness.

Thérèse de Lisieux

-Seattle Mystery Bookshop

The dark is generous and it is patient and it always wins – but in the heart of its strength lies its weakness: one lone candle is enough to hold it back.

Love is more than a candle.

Love can ignite the stars.

Stover

-Seattle Mystery Bookshop

To be great, be whole;
Exclude nothing, exaggerate nothing that is not you.
Be whole in everything. Put all you are
Into the smallest thing you do.
So, in each lake, the moon shines with splendor
Because it blooms up above.

Poems of Fernando Pessoa

-Seattle Mystery Bookshop

A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly. You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.

Roald Dahl

-Seattle Mystery Bookshop

There are many Beths in the world, shy and quiet, sitting in corners till needed, and living for others so cheerfully that no one sees the sacrifices till the little cricket on the hearth stops chirping, and the sweet, sunshiny presence vanishes, leaving silence and shadow behind.

Little Women

-Seattle Mystery Bookshop

The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the teacup opens
A lane to the land of the dead.

Auden

-Seattle Mystery Bookshop

Iron rusts from disuse, stagnant water loses its purity, and in cold weather becomes frozen; even so does inaction sap the vigors of the mind.

Leonardo da Vinci

-Seattle Mystery Bookshop

The dark is generous, and it is patient, and it always wins.
It always wins because it is everywhere.

It is in the wood that burns in your hearth, and in the kettle on the fire; it is under your chair and under your table and under the sheets on your bed. Walk in the midday sun, and the dark is with you, attached to the soles of your feet.

The brightest light casts the darkest shadow.

Stover

-Seattle Mystery Bookshop

Sometimes I have the strangest feeling about you. Especially when you are near me as you are now. It feels as though I had a string tied here under my left rib where my heart is, tightly knotted to you in a similar fashion. And when you go to Ireland, with all that distance between us, I am afraid that this cord will be snapped, and I shall bleed inwardly.

Charlotte Brontë

-Seattle Mystery Bookshop