The Bookshop on the Corner

by Jenny Colgan

Dogs are tremendously good at showing you you don’t have to check your phone every two seconds to have a happy life.

The problem with good things that happen is that very often they disguise themselves as awful things.

“They’re not actually Nazis.” “That’s what everyone thinks. Then before you know it, you’ve got Nazis.”

Because life is like that, isn’t it? If you thought of all the tiny things that divert your path one way or another, some good, some bad, you’d never do anything ever again. And some people don’t. 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. And a few things can help.

“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.”

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.