Joanna Cannon Quotes

..but love paper-aeroplanes where it pleases. I have found that it settles in the most unlikely of places, and once it has, you're left with the burden of where it has landed for the rest of your life.

What do you mean, Jesus?' May Roper pulled the crocheted sea a little further up her legs.
'On the drainpipe. I've seen Him with my own eyes.'
'Have you been in the sun again, Brian?'
'Sheila Dakin thinks it's a sign.'
'A sign she's been at the sherry.

Why does He hate the goats so much?'
[...]
'I'm not sure,' I said. 'He only seems to like sheep.

You've got to find forgiveness, Florence," said Elsie. "You find it so easily in other people, why do you struggle so much to find it in yourself?"
"I'm a bad person. I'm flawed. Damaged."
"Of course you are."
I looked at him.
"We all are. Every one of us is damaged. We need the faults, the breaks, the fracture lines."
"We do?" I said.
'Of course we do. However else would all the light get in?"
I could see Elsie smiling at us.
"You can't define yourself by a single moment." Jack held my hand very tightly. I could feel him shaking. "That moment doesn't make you who you are."
"Then what does?" I said.
"Oh, Florence. Everything else," he said. "Everything else.

The only problem was, when your whole existence is something you have to cope with, you look back one day and find that your strategy has become a way of life.

You've got to find forgiveness, Elsie said; I just didn't realise she meant I had to find it for myself. Perhaps that's the most important moment. Not the moment of the mistake itself, but the moment in which you finally forgive yourself for making it.

It's strange how the worst day of your life often starts just like any other. You might even complain very quietly to yourself about its ordinariness. You might with for something more interesting to happen, something to back of your routine, and just when you think you can't bear the monotony any longer, something comes along that shatters your life to such degree. you with with every cell in your body that your day hadn't become so unordinary.

You can spot someone you know, even in a strange place or in a crowd of people. Theres something about a person that fits into your eyes.

After my bedroom, this was my favourite place in the world. It was carpeted, and had heavy bookcases and ticking clocks and velvet chairs, just like someone's living room. It smelled of unturned pages and unseen adventures, and on every shelf were people I had yet to meet, and places I had yet to visit. Each time, I lost myself in the corridors of books and the polished, wooden rooms, deciding which journey to go on next. Mrs

Distract yourself, that's what Margaret always told him. When you start getting anxious, give your mind something else to think about. He had become an expert at distracting himself. He had distracted himself so much, he found himself drowning in distractions, and all the little details in the world seemed to join up together in his head and make a whole new problem to worry about.

It's the small decisions, the ones that slip themselves into your day unnoticed, the ones that wrap their weight in insignificance. These are the decisions that bury you

Because sometimes you need to run away. You need to believe in something without looking for proof. You need to enjoy a thing, without finding a need to measure its value. You need to run away from a familiar life, into something quite unfamiliar. Even if you are so old, the only running away you will ever do again is in your mind.

My mother said I was at an awkward age. I didn't feel especially awkward, so I presumed she meant that it was awkward for them.

If you ever open a drawer, Florence. If you ever open a drawer and find something there you weren't expecting, just remember there is so very much more to us than the worst thing we have ever done. Remember that, Florence. Please remember, even when I'm not here to remind you.

They assumed I didn't understand the conversation, and it was much easier to let them think that. My mother said I was at an awkward age. I didn't feel especially awkward, so I presumed she meant it was awkward for them.

He missed her reassurance. The way she stole his disquiet and diluted it, and how her unconcern would pull him through their day. She never dismissed his worries, she just disentangled them, smoothing down the edges and spreading them out until they became thin and insignificant

It appeared that Jesus pulled a much bigger crowd if He provided garibaldis.

People tend to believe things just because everyone else does.' Walter looked at his hands and began biting into the skin next to his fingernails. 'They don't search for proof, they just search for approval from everyone else.