The Bookshop on the Corner
by Jenny Colgan
(William Morrow, 2016)
Trains are built for reading.
Page xi.
You’re never alone with a book.
Page xiii.
Every day with a book is slightly better than one without.
Page xiv.
The problem with good things that happen is that very often they disguise themselves as awful things.
Page xv.
She felt, at twenty-nine, oddly surplus to life’s requirements.
Page 12.
Some people go through life not really deciding to do much, not wanting to, always too fearful of the consequences to try something new. Of course, that in itself is also a decision. You’ll get somewhere whether you put any effort into it or not. But doing something new is so hard.
Page 27.
For most of her life, the outdoors had simply been something to shelter from while she got on with her reading.
Page 37.
I want to be with books, have them all around me. And recommend them to other people: books for the brokenhearted and the happy, and people excited to be going on vacation, and people who need to know they aren’t alone in the universe, and books for children who really like monkeys, and, well, everything really. And to go places where I’m needed.
Page 77.
In the Highlands, it rained and it rained and it rained until it felt as if the clouds were coming down and getting in your face, rolling their big black way toward you and unleashing their relentless showers on top of you.
Page 86.
A dead Web site was a sad thing.
Page 93.
“I never understand … why anyone would go to the trouble of making up new people in this world when there’s already billions of the buggers I don’t give a shit about.
Page 102.
“Anything that spreads books and b rings about more books, I would say it is good. Good medicine, not bad.”
Page 120.
“Poetry is good for people who are in strange lands.”
Page 121.
Now, as she surveyed the clean, bare walls of the van, she realized exactly why she had been stockpiling all this time, without even knowing herself what she’d been doing.
Page 140.
“I like to think of it as evacuating the books to safety.”
Page 171.
The more sensibly dressed the person, the more unutterably depraved they liked their fiction; no doubt there was a cosmic balance in it somewhere.
Page 178.
This was great buckets of flowers; of poetry, real poetry; of, she truly believed, deeply held feelings. She was catching the night train.
Page 188.
“When you read a book, you feel like you’re in it.”
Page 202.
“Everyone’s different from how they look on the outside.”
Page 206.
It was astonishingly busy for such a small place. Nina had grown to understand the longer she stayed there that because they were so far away from big-city attractions, and because the weather was so often not their friend, they had to rely on each other through the long winter evenings and difficult days. It was an actual community, not just a long row of houses full of people who happened to live nest to one another. There was a difference, and she had simply never realized it before.
Page 230.
There was a universe inside every human being every bit as big as the universe outside them. Books were the best way Nina knew - apart from, sometimes, music - to breach the barrier, to connect the internal universe with the external, the words acting merely as a conduit between the two worlds.
Pages 234-235.
She didn’t understand what on earth seemed to get her all riled up every time she saw him.
Page 273.
She tried to think what she was going to say: simply no, or it’s not possible, or a proper good-bye, a sad look at chances missed and timing gone wrong.
Page 283.
“You can’t tell anything about anyone just by looking at them.”
Page 300.
It seemed crazy that they could have spent the last three weeks utterly naked with each other, completely open, vulnerable and as close to each other as two people could possibly be, and now they were supposed to pass each other on the street and not mention a thing about it.
Page 310.
It was as if she’d never eaten chocolate in her life, then shed gotten a taste and now wanted to eat it all the time.
Page 310.
He could take away her sex life, he could take away her peace of mind, her hopes for happiness, her home, her livelihood. But NOBODY was taking away her reading.
Pages 313-313.
She threw on a dress it wasn’t quite warm enough to wear, applied some lipstick with a trembling hand, and, trying to fake a confidence she didn’t feel, flung open her front door.
Page 313.
Beautiful things can be dangerous, too.
Page 326.