42 Quotes by Joanna Cannon

It’s nice to have a bit of company, because nothing in this world sounds more lonely than one knife and fork rattling on a dinner plate.

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.

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.

It’s strange, because you can put up with all manner of nonsense in your life, all sorts of sadness, and you manage to keep everything on board and march through it, then someone is kind to you and it’s the kindness that makes you cry. It’s the tiny act of goodness that opens a door somewhere and lets all the misery escape.

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

I waited. I had discovered that, sometimes, if you held on to the silence, people couldn’t stop themselves from filling it up.

Do we?’ I said. It didn’t take them long to undo my life. I had spent eighty years building it, but within weeks, they made it small enough to fit into a manila envelope and take along to meetings. They kidnapped it. They hurried it away from me when I least expected, when I thought I could coat myself in old age and be left to it. A door doesn’t sound the same when you close it for the last time, and a room doesn’t look the same when you know you’ll never see it again.

There is something special about a coastal morning. The day seems to have so much more potential when there’s a seaside attached to it. Perhaps it’s the brightness from the water, scrubbing everything clean like a front step, ready for you to start again.

Now we were old. Now we were different people, and it felt as though everything we went through had happened to someone else, and we had just stood and watched it all from the future.