Top 40 Joanna Cannon Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “It’s always the small decisions that change a life.”

— Joanna Cannon

2. “The most important thing a garden needs is the shadow of a gardener.”

— Joanna Cannon

3. “After my bedroom, this was my favourite place in the world. It was carpeted, and had heavy bookcases and ticking clocks and velvet chairs, just like someone’s living room. It smelled of unturned pages and unseen adventures, and on every shelf were people I had yet to meet, and places I had yet to visit. Each time, I lost myself in the corridors of books and the polished, wooden rooms, deciding which journey to go on next. Mrs.”

— Joanna Cannon

4. “You can spot someone you know, even in a strange place or in a crowd of people. Theres something about a person that fits into your eyes.”

— Joanna Cannon

5. “Because sometimes you need to run away. You need to believe in something without looking for proof. You need to enjoy a thing, without finding a need to measure its value. You need to run away from a familiar life, into something quite unfamiliar. Even if you are so old, the only running away you will ever do again is in your mind.”

— Joanna Cannon

6. “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.”

— Joanna Cannon

7. “There was no horizon. I never thought I would lose the horizon along with everything else, but when you get old you realize whichever direction you choose to face, you find yourself confronted with a landscape filled up with loss.”

— Joanna Cannon

8. “Sometimes, you go through an experience in life that slices into the very bones of who you are, and two different versions of yourself will always sit either side of it, like bookends.”

— Joanna Cannon

9. “It’s when you catch the clock, holding on to a second for just a fraction longer than it should. When the world gives you just a little bit more time to make the right decision. There are long seconds all over the place. We just don’t always notice them.”

— Joanna Cannon

10. “If you ever open a drawer, Florence. If you ever open a drawer and find something there you weren’t expecting, just remember there is so very much more to us than the worst thing we have ever done. Remember that, Florence. Please remember, even when I’m not here to remind you.”

— Joanna Cannon

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

— Joanna Cannon

12. “I think the hardest part of losing anyone is that you still have to live with the same scenery. It’s just the person you are used to isn’t a part of it any more, and all you notice are the gaps where they used to be. It feels as though, if you concentrated hard enough, you could find them again in those empty spaces. Waiting for you.”

— Joanna Cannon

13. “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.”

— Joanna Cannon

14. “Everyone ages, Cyril.” Jack used his most reasonable voice. “On the outside, maybe. But on the inside, I’m the same person I was sixty years ago.” He jabbed at his chest, to show us where his insides are. “It’s just the packaging that’s changed.”

— Joanna Cannon

15. “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.”

— Joanna Cannon

16. “It’s strange how the worst day of your life often starts just like any other. You might even complain very quietly to yourself about its ordinariness. You might with for something more interesting to happen, something to back of your routine, and just when you think you can’t bear the monotony any longer, something comes along that shatters your life to such degree. you with with every cell in your body that your day hadn’t become so unordinary.”

— Joanna Cannon

17. “It’s the small decisions, the ones that slip themselves into your day unnoticed, the ones that wrap their weight in insignificance. These are the decisions that bury you.”

— Joanna Cannon

18. “People tend to believe things just because everyone else does.′ Walter looked at his hands and began biting into the skin next to his fingernails. ‘They don’t search for proof, they just search for approval from everyone else.”

— Joanna Cannon

19. “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.”

— Joanna Cannon

20. “I still hadn’t learned the power of words. How, once they have left your mouth, they have a breath and a life of their own. I had yet to realize that you no longer own them. I hadn’t learned that, once you have let them go, the words can then, in fact, become the owner of you.”

— Joanna Cannon

21. “I stared at the thick gold cross on the altar. It reflected every one of us: the pious and the ungodly; the opportunist and the devout. Each of us had our reasons for being there, quiet and expectant, and secreted between the pages of a hymnbook. How would God manage to answer us all? “Lamb.”

— Joanna Cannon

22. “The only problem with losing your mind was that you never lost the memories you wanted to lose.”

— Joanna Cannon

23. “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.”

— Joanna Cannon

24. “I thought I would like a job where inquiring about everyone else’s private business was considered perfectly routine.”

— Joanna Cannon

25. “It’s the greatest advantage of reminiscing. The past can be exactly how you wanted it to be the first time around.”

— Joanna Cannon

26. “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.”

— Joanna Cannon

27. “The only problem was, when your whole existence is something you have to cope with, you look back one day and find that your strategy has become a way of life.”

— Joanna Cannon

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

— Joanna Cannon

29. “And I decided it really was true after all. You only really need two people to believe in the same thing, to feel as though you just might belong.”

— Joanna Cannon

30. “He missed her reassurance. The way she stole his disquiet and diluted it, and how her unconcern would pull him through their day. She never dismissed his worries, she just disentangled them, smoothing down the edges and spreading them out until they became thin and insignificant.”

— Joanna Cannon

31. “You can see the fracture lines in people sometimes, if you search hard enough. You can see where they’ve broken and tried to mend themselves.”

— Joanna Cannon

32. “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.”

— Joanna Cannon

33. “But sometimes life takes you along a path you only intended to glance down on your way to somewhere else, and when you look back, you realise the past wasn’t the straight line you thought it might be. If you’re lucky, you eventually move forward, but most of us cross from side to side, tripping up over our second thoughts as we walk through life.”

— Joanna Cannon

34. “We sat in silence. I knew straight away that Walter Bishop was the kind of person you could sit in silence with. There were very few people like that, I had found. Most grown-ups liked to fill a silence with conversation. Not important, necessary conversation, but a spray of words that served no purpose other than to cover up the quiet.”

— Joanna Cannon

35. “She always undid the stitches of other people’s worrying and made them disappear. That’s the second thing you should know about Elsie. She always knew what to say to make me feel better.”

— Joanna Cannon

36. “You always think a secret will only be a secret for so long, that one day you will turn to someone else and say, “I’ve never told anyone this... ” and the secret will vanish and become something else. It’s only when you get to the end of your life, when you’re lying on a wipe-clean carpet with only yourself for company, you realise that you never did manage to find the right someone to tell.”

— Joanna Cannon

37. “Sometimes, you feel a memory before you see it. Even though your eyes can’t quite find it, you can smell it and taste it, and hear it shouting to you from the back of your mind.”

— Joanna Cannon

38. “He walked as the rest of the estate slept, along the avenues and the crescents, through corridors of people drifting out of awareness, and the stillness was an opiate to him, cushioning his mind and unthreading his thoughts.”

— Joanna Cannon

39. “We’ve decided she probably isn’t dead after all,” I said. “Well, that’s something.” “And now we need God to find her. You have to remember that God is everywhere, Mrs. Morton.”

— Joanna Cannon

40. “I will watch Harry Potter before I die.”

— Joanna Cannon

41. “Mrs Morton’s knitting needles tutting against each other in disapproval.”

— Joanna Cannon

42. “I looked at the garden, and watched white butterflies dance across dahlias and freesias and geraniums. There was a choir of color, singing for my attention, and it felt as though I were hearing it for the first time.”

— Joanna Cannon

43. “Stop hurrying off into the future, hunting down catastrophes.”

— Joanna Cannon

44. “They loaded someone’s whole life into a lorry and drove it away. There wasn’t even a mark on the pavement to say where it had been. I watched someone walk through the space where it had stood. Everything carried on as it always did.”

— Joanna Cannon

45. “Because sometimes you need to sing and dance. Even if you are eighty. Even if your bones push into your flesh, and the slightest breeze could steal you away.”

— Joanna Cannon