Georgia Clare

I'm a writer, bibliotherapist and meditation guide, living in a village in southwest France with a forest behind the house and a reading list that has got completely out of hand. Book Quote Therapy is mine. So is everything on it.

It started with my grandparents

One of my earliest memories is walking hand in hand with my grandfather to the bookshop in his village. I was very small. He would let me choose whichever book I wanted, any book at all, and I remember the weight of that. Being trusted to decide.

My grandmother gave me a book of poetry when I was seven. Robert Louis Stevenson, A Child's Garden of Verses. I still know some of it by heart.

Between the two of them, they handed me the thing that would hold me up for the next fifty years, though none of us knew it at the time.

Then it became something else

My childhood was not a safe one. There was abuse at home, and outside it a strict religious group that decided what we could read, who we could know, and what we were allowed to think. Between those two things, there was not much room to be a child.

So I read. I scoured the shelves of the library in the small Welsh town I grew up in, hunting for anything I hadn't already read. I borrowed books from anyone who would lend them. My head was permanently in one, which adults tend to read as shyness or rudeness, and which was actually survival.

That never changed. When I finally named my father as an abuser, I turned to books to work out how to carry it. When my marriage ended in betrayal after more than thirty years, I turned to books again, in those first impossible days when nothing else could be tolerated.

It wasn't advice that helped. It was other people's words. The evidence, in black and white, that someone had stood exactly where I was standing, and had gone on to have a life afterwards. That was the thing. Not comfort exactly. Proof.

Why this site exists

I left the religion after forty-nine years. I left the marriage. I moved to France, learned to sit still, learned to write it all down. And I noticed that the same instinct kept surfacing: when someone tells me what they're going through, my mind goes straight to a book.

So I started building the shelf. It now runs to more than 230 literary prescriptions, each one gathered for a single feeling or situation. A handful of books, some poetry, a few lines worth keeping. Grief, betrayal, leaving a high-control group, starting over at fifty, the ordinary day when you can't say what's wrong. Whatever it is, someone has written about it.

I choose every book, every poem and every quotation myself. Nobody pays to be here, and no book is included because it earns more. Where I recommend something for a hard season, it's usually because it got me through one.

What I do now

I write. I record guided meditations, some free and some paid. I'm the author of Quote Therapy, forty-nine short stories set in the villages of southwest France, each built around a borrowed line that finally became someone's own, along with The Synergy Game and Ashes & Wildflowers.

And if you'd like me to choose for you personally rather than browsing the shelf yourself, I do that too.