Wendy Welch > Quotes

“Anyone getting starry-eyed about owning a bookstore should ask herself a few questions: Can you lift a box weighing fifty pounds? Do you know what cat pee on paper smells like and can you get it out? Will you exude patience while solving puzzles that start "I'm looking for a book..." and peter out somewhere between "it has 'The' in the title" and "It has a red cover and the author was a soldier whose last name started with S. Or was it Z?”
― Wendy Welch, The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap: A Memoir of Friendship, Community, and the Uncommon Pleasure of a Good Book

“I remember as a very young child being warned that libraries and bookstores were quiet places where noise wasn’t allowed. Here was yet another thing the adults had gotten wrong, for these book houses pulsed with sounds; they just weren’t noisy. The books hummed. The collective noise they made was like riding on a large boat where the motor’s steady thrum and tickle vibrated below one’s sneakers, ignorable until you listened, then omnipresent and relentless, the sound that carried you forward. Each book brimmed with noises it wanted to make inside your head the moment you opened it; only the shut covers prevented it from shouting ideas, impulses, proverbs, and plots into that sterile silence.”
― Wendy Welch, The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap: A Memoir of Friendship, Community, and the Uncommon Pleasure of a Good Book

“Third places are those needed spaces, neither home nor work, where we are known by our names and valued for being whatever we decide to be -- the clown, the intellectual, the quiet person. Being part of a family is a wonderful thing, and I'm all for team-building at work, but having a place where you don't have to be anything to anyone makes a pleasant breather.”
― Wendy Welch, The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap: A Memoir of Friendship, Community, and the Uncommon Pleasure of a Good Book

“Books are not just things, but dynamic artifacts, milestones showing where the road took a sudden turn on our individual journeys -- our very individual journeys, since a book that changed one person's life is another person's dreaded English assignment. There's no rhyme or reason to what impacts whom except the alchemy of timing, temperament, and title.”
― wendy welch, The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap: A Memoir of Friendship, Community, and the Uncommon Pleasure of a Good Book

“When the occasional customer tells us his or her dream of running a bookstore someday, we recognize our own naivete in that enthusiasm. They may have some inkling about long hours and low pay, but rarely do they know about the fires, the guerrilla bargainers, the bereavements, or the prisons. Neither did we - then. But we sure do now. In all honesty, the scariest, hardest, saddest, and most important stories found in a bookshop aren't in the books, they're in the customers.”
― Wendy Welch, The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap: A Memoir of Friendship, Community, and the Uncommon Pleasure of a Good Book

“Another lesson for bookshop owners: "Learn how to listen yet let it pass through you." Thanks to some therapist friends, I have finally acquired that tough skill. But it wasn't part of our anticipated job description.”
― Wendy Welch, The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap: A Memoir of Friendship, Community, and the Uncommon Pleasure of a Good Book

“The essential criterion for running a bookstore is less "Do you like books?" than "Do you like people?" Ironically, we find that having unlimited access to more reading material than we ever could have imagined means we read less. Chuck and Dee Robinson own Village Books [...]He once said in an interview with business writer Rober Spector, "If you're opening a bookstore because you love reading books, then become a night watchman because you'll be able to read more books that way." He was right. It's amazing how just the sight of so much intellectual fodder quells the appetite, let alone how little time remains to read once the shelves have been straightened, the day's swap credits assessed and put away, and the sales taxes tallied.”
― Wendy Welch, The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap: A Memoir of Friendship, Community, and the Uncommon Pleasure of a Good Book

“In case the term is unfamiliar, the best description ever for 'cozies' is 'murder mysteries where no one cares who got killed because they're all distracted by cooking new recipes or following intricate handicraft instructions.'"--The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap”
― Wendy Welch

“Books, be they physical objects or electronic pulses, are way cool. They are idea houses. So let those who want to read from machines. Those who love the feel, the smell, the gilt edging and the pretty covers and the soft paper, and the kinetic memories will enjoy the physical objects. Either form can be artifact. So long as we're all reading, and gaining joy from it, does it really matter so much?”
― Wendy Welch, The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap: A Memoir of Friendship, Community, and the Uncommon Pleasure of a Good Book

“Quem gosta de ler, adora estar rodeado de grandes aglomerações de livros: livrarias, bibliotecas, casas onde as paredes estão forradas de estantes e lombadas. São lugares mágicos.”
― Wendy Welch

“God bless any woman trying to make life better for children she did not bear, and any man who did not biologically father the child he seeks to help.”
― Wendy Welch, Fall or Fly: The Strangely Hopeful Story of Foster Care and Adoption in Appalachia

“If you’re from a place targeted by other people trying to tell you what you’re supposed to be and why you aren’t up to that benchmark, please hear this message: the problems within a community are not only solved by those who live in that community but also should be defined by that community. We who live with the problems know when something works and when it doesn’t and where priorities need to lie.”
― Wendy Welch, Fall or Fly: The Strangely Hopeful Story of Foster Care and Adoption in Appalachia

“It’s a little frightening to realize that our deepest interactions and needs reduce to a phrase as simple as that ready-made Facebook relationship status, “It’s complicated.”
― Wendy Welch, Fall or Fly: The Strangely Hopeful Story of Foster Care and Adoption in Appalachia

“Coal isn’t king here; family is.”
― Wendy Welch, Fall or Fly: The Strangely Hopeful Story of Foster Care and Adoption in Appalachia

“In Coalton, blaming the victim and suspecting those who came to help have both been elevated to art forms.”
― Wendy Welch, Fall or Fly: The Strangely Hopeful Story of Foster Care and Adoption in Appalachia

“Like recognizing that every day brings a new piece of a big puzzle, that some relationships take longer than others, that nothing and nobody is perfect, that the only true and final failure is abdicating responsibility, that small successes should be celebrated on the way to the larger goal. Those are the baseline attri”
― Wendy Welch, Fall or Fly: The Strangely Hopeful Story of Foster Care and Adoption in Appalachia

“what dedicated social workers couldn’t change for the better, they wouldn’t talk about”
― Wendy Welch, Fall or Fly: The Strangely Hopeful Story of Foster Care and Adoption in Appalachia