7 Quotes by Ella Risbridger

This is what you learn to see, when you sit alone in a forbidden place, reading faster than you can turn the pages You learn how very strange and lovely the world is and can be. How there is always more to find out, how there is nothing new under the sun - and that you are not alone, not really, not ever, with a book.

In my life I have had several moments of total clarity. Not revelations, necessarily, but times and places where I have, fleetingly, felt that everything in the world was more real than usual, and that everything was brighter and truer and clearer than ever before.

It’s not terribly fashionable any more to like bread. It’s sort of lucky that I’ve never managed to be fashionable, because I’ve always loved bread: I love it wholeheartedly and overwhelmingly. Sometimes I think there is no meal – no matter how thoughtful or beautiful or delicious

And I was scared, and I was stuck. It was ridiculous, laughable: sometimes anxiety is. Often it is. It doesn't make it any less real, or any less difficult to manage.

There’s also some really solid kneading to be done here, which is the best cure for a troubled heart: hands in the dough, window wide, something jaunty on the radio.

And that’s why I’m sitting here, with the South West Trains spokesman on a loop inside my head, because times are changing – because life is change – and the person I loved most is still dead.

I love recipes like this, reading them and making them. There’s something brilliant about a recipe that doesn’t ask too much of you; a recipe, in fact, where getting it exactly right would be exactly wrong; a recipe you can fiddle with, and tend to when you remember.