TODAY marks the start of Book Week Scotland, the annual celebration of reading and readers run by Scottish Book Trust.

This year, the aim is to come up with the definitive 'best quote from a book, ever' which has thrown up some interesting suggestions (visit scottishbooktrust.com to vote for your favourite.)

I like the Jane Austen one  - "Laugh as much as you choose, but you will not laugh me out of my opinion", from Pride and Prejudice; and Jackie Kay's moving lines in her poem Darling - "The dead don't go till you do, loved ones; the dead are still here, holding our hands."

My favourite quote from a book isn't on the list, but I've been thinking about it this week, following the terrible events in Paris.

Anne Frank, the young German Jewish girl who spent two years in hiding with her family to escape the Nazis in occupied Amsterdam during the Second World War, is famous for her diary, which was published after her death.

The book made a massive impact on me, when I read it for the first time just after I started high school. Anne was about the same age as me, we both loved to write, we even had the same name. I felt like I knew her - so I was completely unprepared for how it ended. I still remember the confusion I felt, that someone so young and talented and brave and funny, could be murdered in such an incomprehensible, brutal way.

That confusion resurfaced on Friday when news of the events unfolding in Paris started to filter through.

The most sobering aspect was the randomness of it all - these 'targets' were concert-goers, diners, football fans, relaxing on a night out. People like me and you, in other words.

What will happen next? Undoubtedly, things will change - borders will probably close; events will be cancelled; people will be scared. Darker days are coming.

So it feels like a good time to remember the words of a young girl who found light in her darkest days and, thanks to her diary, continues to spread a message of hope.

About a month before the Nazis arrested her and sent to her death in a concentration camp, Anne Frank wrote:

“In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death.

"I hear the ever approaching thunder ......and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquillity will return again.”