Mary Ann Shaffer, The Guernsey Literary And Potato Peel Pie Society Quotes

I have gone to [this bookshop] for years, always finding the one book I wanted - and then three more I hadn’t known I wanted.

I don't want to be married just to be married. I can't think of anything lonelier than spending the rest of my life with someone I can't talk to, or worse, someone I can't be silent with.

Men are more interesting in books than they are in real life.

Perhaps there is some secret sort of homing instinct in books that brings them to their perfect readers. How delightful if that were true.

Reading good books ruins you for enjoying bad books.

Then I imagined a lifetime of having to cry to get him to be kind, and I went back to no again.

Do you arrange your books alphabetically? (I hope not.)

Think of it! We could have gone on longing for one another and pretending not to notice forever. This obsession with dignity can ruin your life if you let it.

‎What a blight that woman is. Do you happen to know why? I lean toward a malignant fairy at her christening.

All his flowers have been awaiting me on my arrival. I don't know whether to feel flattered or hunted.

But the truth is that I'm gloomy - gloomier than I ever was during the war. Everything is so broken, Sophie: the roads, the buildings, the people. Especially the people.

Oh bless Speranza, for giving her son such a preposterous name as Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde.

He's got that way of believing his opinion is the truth, but he's not disagreeable about it. He's too sure he's right to bother being disagreeable.

Sorrow has rushed over the world like the waters of the Deluge, and it will take time to recede. But already, there are small islands of - hope? Happiness? Something like them, at any rate.

Boredom is a powerful reason, and the prospect of fun is a powerful draw - especially when you are young.

I did not want to spend my time reading about people who never were, doing things they never did.

I did not throw 'The Shepherd Boy Sings in the Valley of Humiliation' at the audience. I threw it at the elocution mistress. I meant to cast it at her feet, but I missed.