Quotes from Jenny Colgan

What have anxiety-creating engines designed to distract, enervate, and worry you got to do with your mental health?

It's as if you pull something around yourself, make yourself look smaller and more insignificant. Than you already are." Nina blinked. "Like you don't want anyone to notice you.

For most of her life, the outdoors had simply been something to shelter from whilst she got on with her reading.

Here, though, in front of my eyes was a churn; an unhappy maelstrom of three elements - air, earth and water - all at war with one another, wrestling for territory, demanding and striking one another. You could not see where the ground began, or see if the rain was coming from up, down, left or right. There were no glimpses of the moon or stars through the fast-moving clouds. Only the regular forks of lightning zapping through showed any direction in the madness.

And Polly nodded, and thought about the odd counterbalance of weights in the universe—how bad things could happen, and sometimes wonderful, wonderful things could happen, but you weren't always fated to be in the heart of the story; sometimes it simply wasn't about you; you didn't always get all the answers.

It seemed nobody had to be sorry any more for anything they did; instead they doubled down, were proud of it, never ever admitted to being in the wrong about anything.

Use your inner resources. Stop trying to distract yourself with tiny pictures and other people's lives. You're distracting yourself from things you ought to be owning up to.

There was an excuse for everything these days. Except it meant someone else picking up the pieces.

This bread has been anointed by God, I said to myself. He wants me to have it.... All I know is, when I am old, gray and bedbound and everything else has gone, I will still remember how good it tasted.

I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor lords, nor leaders, nor the present, nor the future, nor the heights, the depths and no other creature can separate you from the love of God, from Jesus Christ our Lord. They were pretty verses, whatever you believed; and comforting too, the concept of a huge blanket of love that could never let you down.

Find something true to your spirit and your soul and do it every day.

Trees are astonishing communicators." "When they rustle?" "It's more like a kind of bubbly noise. If they're thirsty. Like trying to get the last bits through a straw." "Why isn't everyone absolutely freaking out about this?" said Carmen. "Well, dendrologists are. For years, it was considered absolutely ridiculous to think it. Then studies came along and proved it.

It would be lovely, wouldn't it, whenever you're going through something difficult, if someone could just tap you on the shoulder and say, "Don't worry, it's completely worth it. It seems like absolutely horrible crap now, but I promise it will all come good in the end," and you could say, "Thank you, Fairy Godmother.

Huckle honey

Hang on," said Nina, standing up and going inside. She came back with a small book with a woman standing on the cover. "Here." Lissa picked it up. "I got two copies by accident," said Nina. "You can have it." "The Accidental Tourist," read Lissa. "What's it about?" "Healing," said Nina. "Best book ever written on the subject.

What do you think happiness is?" she asked him. "A by-product," he answered immediately, "to being useful." She looked at him. "What?" she said. "What do you mean?" He looked back at her, surprised. "Well," he said, "if you do good work and are useful, that makes you happy.

Oh crap,' she said, as Apostil became more demanding. 'I did that thing where I was drunkenly utterly convinced I was sober.

Hello!" barked Dr. Joan Davenport. Lissa frowned slightly and felt her heart rate jump up and her nerves pile in. "Um," said Lissa. "Are you Alyssa Westcott?" "Um, Lissa?" Joan looked like she couldn't care less about that. "Well, you're my charge, it appears. I did ask for a boy." Lissa was confused. "Just my little joke! Never mind! Nobody reads, I get it, I get it.

a huge claw-foot bathtub in the black and white bathroom.

The problem with good things that happen is that very often they disguise themselves as awful things. It would be lovely, wouldn't it, whenever you're going through something difficult, if someone could just tap you on the shoulder and say, "Don't worry, it's completely worth it. It seems like absolutely horrible crap now, but I promise it will all come good in the end

Just do something. You might make a mistake, then you can fix it. But if you do

nothing, you can't fix anything. And your life might turn out to be full of regrets.

I want to be with books, have them all around me.

Everywhere in Scotland, statistically speaking, June is your best bet in terms of when to visit.