Jenny Colgan

“I want to go to the party!’‘I said no.’‘I’ve been totally good.’‘You shot me with an arrow.”

“I think love is caramel. Sweet and fragant; always welcome. It is the gentle golden colour of a setting harvest sun; the warmth of a squeezed embrace; the easy melting of two souls into one and a taste that lingers even when everything else has melted away. Once tasted it is never forgotten.”

“Life was always easier, reflected Issy, when you were carrying a large Tupperware full of cakes. Everyone was happy to see you then.”

“Baking is...Life. So when you describe what you're making, you must describe life. Do you see? It's not just recipes..”

“No, I would say they are more arseholey than you.”

“Then when Matt had come along it hadn't been fireworks, passion and fights and drama. It had been low- key, sweet, lovely. But that didn't meant it wasn't the real thing. It never had done. Just because it wasn't suprising hadn't meant it wasn't right.”

“She's home. That's all. That's true love, I can't explain it any better than that.”

“Dear ignoramuses,Halloween is not 'a yankee holiday' celebrated only by gigantic toddlers wearing baseball caps back to front and spraying 'automobiles' with eggs. This is ignorance.Halloween is an ancient druidic holiday, one the Celtic peoples have celebrated for millennia. It is the crack between the last golden rays of summer and the dark of winter; the delicately balanced tweak of the year before it is given over entirely to the dark; a time for the souls of the departed to squint, to peek and perhaps to travel through the gap. What could be more thrilling and worthy of celebration than that? It is a time to celebrate sweet bounty, as the harvest is brought in. It is a time of excitement and pleasure for children before the dark sets in. We should all celebrate that.Pinatas on the other hand are heathen monstrosities and have no place in a civilised society.”

“Turkish DelightTurkish delight has had a bad reputation since that man C.S.Lewis - a positive genius in other ways - linked it for ever with one of the most terrifying creations in literature, the White Witch of Narnia, and that naughty, sticky, traitorous Edmund. But with the sensuous pleasure imbued in its melting, gelatinous texture, and, when made in the proper way, delicately perfumed with rose petals, flavoured with oils and dusted with sugar, it reclaims its power as a sweet as seductive as Arabian nights. The fact that it now carries with it a whiff of danger merely adds to its pleasure. It is not, truly, a sweet for children. They simply complain, and get the almonds stuck up their noses,”

“I have a head for business and a body for sin. Unfortunately, the sin appears to be gluttony.”

“We'd even devised the Buffy scale of life relationships: you start off wanting Xander, spend your twenties going out with Spike and setttle down with giles.”

“Christmas, as a practicing Catholic child, was seen as a reward for lots and lots and lots of church.”