Alice Slater > Quotes

“Reading is a way of life for some customers, the kind of customers who buy more than they read, who behave as though ‘bookworm’ is as inherent as their blood type or their astrological sign.”
― Alice Slater, Death of a Bookseller

“While I'm in the shop, I dream of all the things I could be doing if I were at home, cleaning my flat, reading the stack of unread books by my bed, cracking on with the poem I'd started back in September, but when my days off come around, I waste them in bed on my phone, scrolling and scrolling and scrolling, and stalking Eli's girlfriend. I'd planned to start writing something that I'd been thinking about for a while, something about my mother, but everything feels soupy, my body a great weight I have to drag around my flat. I never have the energy when I have the time and I never have the time when I have the energy.”
― Alice Slater, Death of a Bookseller

“It was a high-profile case and . . . I just hate that my trauma is tied to this horrible story, and I can’t talk about one without talking about the other. I hate that her name will forever be associated with the man who killed her, and I hate that the world only remembers her as a chapter in the story of his life.”
― Alice Slater, Death of a Bookseller

“I just wish I could have found my way here without throwing petrol over my entire life and setting it on fire.’ ‘You had to rest at rock bottom,’ she replied, ‘to gather the strength to swim back up to the surface.”
― Alice Slater, Death of a Bookseller

“Bookshops are oceans and sections are like tides, they grow and they shrink, they grow and the shrink. It depends on the season and what's selling and what new trends are emerging. Scandi Noir, Dystopian YA, Adult Coloring In, Hygge. It only takes one bestseller to start a tsunami of copycats. Just as you think the swell is here to stay, sales start to taper off and the bookshop breathes and contracts and swallows whatever stock didn't sell, reabsorbs it back into the master section, back into crime or YA or crafts and we rearrange everything to fill the gap until the next trend gains momentum. A good bookseller can sense when the tides are turning, when sales are starting to wane. A bad bookseller doesn't adapt to change, will cling to those declining sales instead of embracing the next big thing. A really bad bookseller will favor their personal taste over customer interest.”
― Alice Slater, Death of a Bookseller

“I know that sounds bad,’ I say. ‘But the whole point of my poetry was to commemorate the people who are often forgotten by true crime narratives, and then I have this true crime nut all over it, desperate to know who the murderers are, like it’s a fun puzzle to piece together.”
― Alice Slater, Death of a Bookseller

“William Morris: have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.”
― Alice Slater, Death of a Bookseller

“Those Pumpkin Spice Girls. Garden centre girls who filled their flats with macramé and air plants.”
― Alice Slater, Death of a Bookseller

“There’s no resolution to grief, no happy ending. It’s a clock that never stops ticking, a day that never ends.”
― Alice Slater, Death of a Bookseller

“My mother was murdered by a serial killer,’ I say in a rush of blurred words. ‘How do you think it makes me feel to see you stand there and joke about autopsies? She was strangled to death and she pissed herself as she died. Is that the kind of thing you like to hear?”
― Alice Slater, Death of a Bookseller

“All I got from my dad was his kitschy surname and the occasional tense dinner around Christmas and birthdays during which he cheerfully dismissed bookselling as a legitimate career and instead tried to push me into getting his estimation of ‘a real job’.”
― Alice Slater, Death of a Bookseller

“If her goal was to remove the violence from true crime narratives, the result was the opposite. Between descriptions of the weather and women doing ordinary things – hanging laundry, returning video tapes, dropping children off at school – I could feel the spilled”
― Alice Slater, Death of a Bookseller

“One after the other, in quick succession. That’s the way to do it. Rather burn out than fade away. No, to get away with serial killing, you needed several stars to align: low-profile victims, a healthy pinch of police incompetence or corruption, and a splash of sheer good luck.”
― Alice Slater, Death of a Bookseller

“Vulnerable women, right?’ Sarah said with cold authority. ‘Women who’d been let down by society and let down by the state, and then they were let down by the cops who didn’t give enough of a shit about their deaths to investigate them properly. They were let down by every single institution that was meant to lift them up.”
― Alice Slater, Death of a Bookseller

“I don’t like feeling insufficiently informed about things.”
― Alice Slater, Death of a Bookseller

“It’s the words that have power. Somewhere between the ink that’s printed on each page and my understanding of the content is a plain across which my mother’s mind has also wandered, and that landscape exists in every single edition, whether or not it has been touched by my mother’s hand. That’s the power of reading.”
― Alice Slater, Death of a Bookseller

“I fold the pages, bend the covers, stuff them in my handbag, cover them in greasy fingerprints, in coffee, in wine, in bathwater. I lose them, lend them out, give them away. It’s not that I mean to be careless, but the reverence I have for books only extends to the words on the page, the magic between the lines. I think that’s why I’m such a good bookseller. I’m selling things, artefacts, objets, yes. But that’s not all. I’m also selling magic.”
― Alice Slater, Death of a Bookseller

“By the time the first customer arrives, the sun has disappeared behind the old department store, and the light is back to its usual dishwater, and no one sees its gentle fade from amber to yellow to grey but me.”
― Alice Slater, Death of a Bookseller

“normie with a private education, bookselling just a pit stop before a job in publishing.”
― Alice Slater, Death of a Bookseller

“Head pressed against the cool metro-tiled wall, I think about how many times I’ve found myself here on a night out, alone in a bathroom stall either crying or vomiting or both.”
― Alice Slater, Death of a Bookseller

“It was lonely, but books made good company.”
― Alice Slater, Death of a Bookseller

“They all speak the same language, these women who make their millions with snappy lip gloss tutorials and guided tours of their make-up collections, their thrift store hauls, detailed inventories of the contents of their handbags and their fridges. They post pictures advertising online classes and teeth-whitening kits and vitamin-infused gummy bears that promise to make your hair grow thicker and faster, all marked with the ubiquitous #ad.”
― Alice Slater, Death of a Bookseller

“Christmas is transformative: wine is transformed with spices, butter with a wicked splash of brandy, orange juice with champagne. We have to transform the shop into a winter wonderland,”
― Alice Slater, Death of a Bookseller

“The bar was the kind of try-hard place that normies liked, desperate to recreate the careless cool of an American dive bar with carefully curated neglect.”
― Alice Slater, Death of a Bookseller

“no longer a bookseller, no longer a virgin, no longer just a true crime fan. I was an active participant. I was a murderer, a criminal. I was diabolical. Jackie was rolling”
― Alice Slater, Death of a Bookseller

“He often wondered if he already owned the outfit he’d die in, if he’d already met the person who’d hear his last words. Who would be the last person to see him alive? Under which sky would he take his last breath?”
― Alice Slater, Let the Bad Times Roll

“every dish tasted like a microwaved sanitary towel smothered in regurgitated mozzarella.”
― Alice Slater, Death of a Bookseller

“Poetry?’ she said. ‘Christ. What you need is to get out a bit, meet someone. When I was your age, I had a different man on my arm every night of the week.”
― Alice Slater, Death of a Bookseller

“The dog looks up and grins in that peculiar way that Staffies do.”
― Alice Slater, Death of a Bookseller

“it was like a switch was flipped and I was somewhere else, deep in the dungeon of my mind, lost in some depraved thought.”
― Alice Slater, Death of a Bookseller