I KNOW what my mother would have said if I’d shown her the title of this book: “It’s being so cheerful...” Bronwen Wrigley has been in poor health for many years and she has compiled this book of quotations as a means of psychotherapy to help her cope. I must confess, the relentless gloom page after page had an unexpected effect on me: it made me giggle. A bit like laughing in church at the holiest part of the service. But there is room for a book like this in the modern world which perpetually insists that everything must be “upbeat”.

Some of the best lines in the book were written by Bronwen herself.

For instance: “Just for a change, God leaves us alone, sits back and counts the fallen sparrows.” Not a barrel of laughs, is it? But it has a spare and melancholy beauty about it.

You can be dark and amusing at the same time. Try: “Love is a temporary insanity curable by marriage.”

Again there is a heartbreaking loveliness in: “...an unnameable something, a desire for which pierces us like a rapier at the smell of a bonfire, the sound of wild ducks flying overhead, the morning cobwebs in late summer, or the sound of falling waves.”

This conjures perfectly the feeling we all know as nostalgia - the inseparable connection between joy and sorrow, between desire and loss.

Sometimes the pessimism is hilarious, as in: “If we see a light at the end of the tunnel, it’s the light of an oncoming train.” The truth can sometimes be expressed with utter simplicity as in the quote from TS Eliot: “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.”

Wrigley hopes her readers will “...elicit some pleasure from the supremely talented writers whose quotations are featured in my book.”

My first thought on reading this was that it’s a bit like saying you hope that the damned souls in hell are all having a jolly wonderful time. But there are deeper currents.

As I read the book for a second time, I came to realise that the sweet consolation it gives comes from the knowledge that all those great writers, and thousands of ordinary people, have lived with pain and disappointment and have managed to survive - and, in many cases, to more than survive: to triumph.