Jane Green Quotes

Whenever our friends get involved with married men we hear about what they say and it's always the same and we always tell our friends that he's never going to leave her, but the minute it happens to us, the minute we meet a married man and he says he loves his wife but he's not in love with her, we believe him.

What I've come to learn with self-publishing is that if you want to provide readers with something of equal quality, it requires the same amount of time and expense.

I'm nothing but envious that you've been happily married for two years. Try hauling your cookies on a new blind date every Friday, only to have your, already extremely low, expectations dashed as you meet men who look like Quasimodo and have Homer Simpson's IQ.

However close you are, you know that's another friend you won't be seeing anymore. You won't have anything in common anymore, since you are not interested in babies, and they are no longer interested in life.

Other people's behavior is none of my business.

Every time we try and get it together, something happens to pull us apart, and I can't help but feel that this is just isn't meant to be. And God knows I'm happy enough on my own, but tell me, is this how am I supposed to carry on?

Marriage is supposed to be this huge great overwhelming passion, and that we're supposed to be looking for our soulmate, our other half, but it's actually pretty damn mundane. After all the excitement goes, what you really want to be left with is someone who is a really good person and who adores you, and who you can grow old with. I know the bastards are exciting, but they don't make a good husband material.

Chick lit was amazing, and I was thrilled to be part of it.

It's about thinking that being blond & slim & perfect will automatically bring you happiness, & then discovering that life is as full of as many disappointments as there were before.

All I could see was that the one year I was really primed for holiday cheer, no one else was cooperating.

we're the only ones in control of our happiness.

I don't think it matters who you love, just as long as you love. Who cares whether it's a man or a woman? Why does that have anything more to do with the person inside than the color of someone's skin? Personally, I'm pretty fucking disappointed that I seem to be one hundred percent heterosexual.

When it's just sex, you're allowed to be predatory, to make the first move, to entice them into bed, because it's not necessary to make them fall in love with you.

Forever feels a long time when you're eighteen. When you're away from home for the first time in your life, when you forge instant friendships that are so strong they are destined, surely, to be with you until the bitter end.

Each of us may think we know exactly what we need to make us happy, what will be good for us, what will ensure we have our happy ending, but life rarely works out in the way we expect, and our happy ending may have all sorts of unexpected twists and turns, be shaped in all sorts of unexpected ways

Amazing how spending some money, especially when you haven't got it, can perk you up.

And then there was him, the long and painful love of her life.

But he had already planned. Already planned the holiday. The proposal. Even the ring.............., he loved her, but he wasn't sure that love was enough.

Sadly, I don't think books ever sell based on your name alone - the minute we make an assumption like that is the minute it all goes horribly wrong!

I was twenty-seven when I came up with the idea for my first novel.

I cannot believe that I am actually excited at the sight of him. It has been long since anyone has made me feel THIS ... and even though I know I've avoided THIS for fear of getting hurt, there's something about him that makes me want to trust him.

You don't have to wait for someone to treat you bad repeatedly. All it takes is once, and if they get away with it that once, if they know they can treat you like that, then it sets the pattern for the future.

Sometimes not thinking too hard is the easiest thing of all.

It was everything I had dreamed of, his hands snaking through my hair, my own wrapped around his back, unable to believe I had been given license to touch this boy I had loved for so long, license to hold him, to slip my tongue in his mouth, listen to him sigh with pleasure.

In 'Straight Talking,' I had bared my soul, and the press attention had been overwhelming. There were times when I felt scared and vulnerable, regretting the articles I had written to publicize the book, regretting I had opened my life up for all to see.

What I want in a good beach read is sunshine, drama, easy-reading and transportation to another world and other people's problems.

She walks along the pavement, lost in thoughts about the Internet, so deeply immersed that before she knows it she's at her front door, and guess what? She completely forgot to buy some chocolate on the war home.

The best things in life always find us when we're not looking for them.

Both trying to suppress the knowledge that hugs like this mean only one thing. GOODBYE.

She always says she doesn't believe women should get married before the age of thirty-five ... she says women change so much in their twenties, they can't possibly know who they are, and the choices they make before the age of thirty are rarely good ones.

A friend of mine suddenly announced she had written a novel and got a publishing deal; I thought, 'Hang on ... if she can do it, I can bloody well do it, too.' That novel went to a bidding war, and went on to be a huge best-seller.

I thought my entire life was coming apart, but I think I just realized that sometimes the thing you think is going to ruin your life is the thing that saves you.

I do what most women do. I meet someone and some of it's right, maybe he looks right, or has the right job, or the right background, and, instead of sitting back and waiting for him to reveal his other bits, I make them up. I decide how he thinks, how he's going to treat me, and, sure enough, every time I conclude that this time he's definitely my perfect man, and all of a sudden, well, not so suddenly perhaps, usually around six months after we've split up, I see that he wasn't the person I thought he was at all.

She rattled around that huge house, growing more and more used to being on her own, resenting his presence more and more when he was back for the weekends, feeling like he was invading her space.
They became like strangers, ships that pass in the night, not able to agree on anything, not having any common ground

The fact is that blaming doesn't get you anywhere. It keeps you stuck. Blaming stops you from moving on with your life.

You see what you want to see,
And you hear what you want to hear.
You dig?

Alcohol made me beautiful in a way I never felt the rest of the time.

I think perhaps we all cook to feed some kind of hunger in ourselves. I am nourished by being surrounded by family and friends, by creating something delicious for them, by nurturing them.

Shock doesn't hit all at once. I have learned.

I had just got married when I started writing my fourth novel. I'd come back from honeymoon, moved into our first house - a gorgeous little carriage house in London - and made my office on the third floor, overlooking the treetops in North West London.

Melanoma is not the most common of skin cancers, but it is the most dangerous if not found in the early stages.

The place she felt happiest, the place she found her solace and joy, was in the pages of books. She

I am not someone who's very good at looking after herself, and I am also not someone who goes on holiday very often.

That's how it is with relationships, it's a part of life, and all the great love songs and poems and films have been written by people who were standing where I was that morning as Simon shut the door. Doesn't make it any easier though.

I love the English language, playing with words, watching sentences fit together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle,

When it's right, it's right.

I am not a big skier, but I love apres-ski wear and imagine I would look great in an all-white, fur-trimmed ski suit.

I believed our touching to be more intense because of it's very holding back. Belief is always a choice.

Taking a risk is always frightening, but I gave myself a set period of time and had enough money to see me through. I operated from the belief that things would be okay, that if I wasn't successful I would find myself a job, but either way, I would be fine.

I know plenty of people with kids in elite, private schools and had heard many stories. I have drifted into the homes of some of those very wealthy families in New York and am fascinated with the dynamic and how much freedom the children are given.

On the way back to the office- I get a cab, on expenses, naturally- I decide that I could quite like Ed. Maybe I could even fancy him, and maybe the fact that I'm not thinking about him that much when I'm not with him is a good thing, maybe it means this is a proper relationship, not just lust, or the equivalent to a teenage crush. Because quite frankly I'm sick of falling madly in love and spending twenty-four hours a day thinking about them and crying with misery when they don't phone. I'm sick of being the kind of girl who, when they say jump, says how high. I'm sick of always, always being the one to fall in love and get hurt. And maybe this is how it should be, getting on with my life and not putting all my energies into a relationship.

One person can't be expected to fulfill all your needs; that's just unreasonable." "True,

Loving she realises is a verb. It is an act. It is not enough to say you love someone, and then forget about them, or trust a relationship will stay strong simply because you share a house or children or a life.
Loving requires acts of love. It requires thinking of your spouse, doing things for them to make them happy. It requires acting in loving ways, even when you are tired, or bogged down with work, or so stressed you are waking up every night with a jaw sore from grinding your teeth.
They forgot to do that, she now knows. They forgot to love each other. They expected love to continue, without putting any work into it, and today she knows this is why her marriage failed.

All those years when Ronni thought she was sick, all those years convinced that every mole was melanoma, every cough was lung cancer, every case of heartburn was an oncoming heart attack, after all those years, when the gods finally stopped taking care of her she wasn't scared. What a pity, she thought after the doctor first diagnosed her. Then, when she refused to believe it, after the second, and the third, agreed, she thought again, what a pity I wasted all those years worrying about the worst. Somehow now that the worst was upon her, it was peaceful, calming, as if this was what she had always been waiting for. Now that it was here, it wasn't scary at all.

You didn't like him, did you, Dad?"
"It wasn't that I didn't like him," my dad says slowly. "It was just that he lives in a completely different world, and I worried that he didn't really approve of you the way you are, that he was trying to change you into something else."
God, I never realized my dad was that perceptive..
"You see, the thing is," he says after we've both sat for a while in the sunshine, "the thing is that love is really the most important thing. I know it's hard for you to see it now" - he chuckles quietly- "but when I first laid eyes on your mother I thought she was fantastic, and I've never stopped loving her, not for a second. Oh yes, we've had our rough patches, and she can be a bit of an old battle-ax at times, but I still love her. That in-love feeling at the beginning settles down into a different, familiar sort of love, but it has to be there right from the start, otherwise it just won't work.

I am not a people pleaser. I am not a person who says things because she thinks it will make the other person happy, nor am I a person who offers things she cannot deliver because I want the other person to like me.

I have learned that it is imperative that I make time for my friends, that they demand to be as much a part of the mix as my family and my work, and perhaps more so, because they are not an inevitability.

No, really, it's fine, says the woman, getting up to leave.

I consider myself pretty fearless, but the one thing I have always been frightened of is cancer.

I think relationships are very difficult. It's very easy to get swept away with excitement, glamour, and passion. I think the trick is to look for friendship rather than passion.

I left my job as a feature writer on a newspaper to write a book, then sent it off to a number of agents thinking they would all reject me. Within a week, most had come back to say they loved what they had read, which then led to a bidding war for my first two novels.

in which the soap star talked about her drug bust. "Louise isn't even a bloody

My conscious self would do anything to avoid people with cheating tendencies, but my subconscious keeps trying to recreate home and keeps bringing me back to people who recreate my childhood.

Life, Steffi has learned, carries on around the pain, making room for it, absorbing it until it becomes part of the daily fabric, wrapping itself around you and lodging itself in your heart.

My favorite part of speaking at events has never been the speaking, but the reading of my books.

She had married him because she felt sage, because she'd had enough pain to last her a lifetime, and because although he had many faults, faults she was aware of before she married him, she knew he wouldn't hurt her.
She knew because there was no passion, and the only time she had felt passion, it had come with a price.

Once the intimacy has gone, however well you may get on, however friendly you may become, it is hard to believe it was ever there.

You were so talented," her mother says, smiling. "It is such a pity you didn't pursue that. Don't marry someone because you think you need a partner. And don't marry someone who tries to mold you into what he wants his wife to be. You're better than that. Marry, if you do at all, only someone who loves you just the way you are. Because you are precious. There. I've said my piece. Are you still talking to me?" Meredith

Sometimes in life, you have to make things happen. That you can change your life if you're willing to let go of the old and actively look for the new. That even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there.

I am beginning to realize, at the ripe old age of twenty-nine, that one of the problems I have in life is a tendency to completely romanticize how things will be in the future, which inevitably leads to disappointment because it's pretty much never, never, what I expect

I do know that I have always been one of life's observers, always standing slightly on the outside, watching.

I have long been fascinated by our inclination to assume others we meet have the same moral code, similar values, and yet we can never be sure.

To be honest, I'm not sure about this whole scared of commitment business. I think it's become too handy, a useful phrase that men can bandy about whenever they feel like being assholes. And sure, I do believe there are some men who are genuinely terrified of commitment, but there aren't that many, and for the most part I think it's that they haven't met the right woman yet. Because if a man, no matter how scared he professed to be, met the woman of his dreams, he wouldn't want to let her go, would he? And sure, he might not want to actually get married, but if he were madly in love and risked losing her, he'd do it, wouldn't he?
That's what I think, anyway.

Horrible as this is to admit, I think I cried less because my dad was dying than for the dad I had never had.

Nothing like being with people you've known almost your entire life. Having a shared history is something you just can't create with the new ones. No matter how much you like that, it just isn't the same.

No!" Sally said. "I didn't want you here in the first place. Why are you here? What do you want from me? Do you want to take my stuff?" She snatched the tiara from her head and cradled it against her chest. "Is that it? You think you can come here and help yourself to my pre- cious jewels? Get out of here! I can't stand you, Grace. 1 never could. Always whining, whining, whining. Why are you here? What do you want from me? You always

The definition of insanity is doing what you've always done and expecting different results.

I read so much about men who aren't what they seem, and particularly stories written by women who found out their husbands had a slew of secrets they knew nothing about.

Good relationships require kindness, commitment, and appreciation.

The only best friends she has ever really had, has ever wanted, could ever truly count on, is Elliott.

I know that sounds odd, but I have always felt that the English love children as long as they are polite, quiet, and well behaved. Americans seem to love children however they behave.

When I first started writing, I was living in England and I had that uniquely English sense of sarcasm, which has definitely seemed to have left me. I am a naturalized American and my sensibility has become far more American.

When I'm single, I'm this fabulous, independent, confident woman, and then I get involved with one disastrous man after another and I turn into this needy, insecure, fearful girl who becomes frightened of her own shadow.

I'm not sure that insecurity is a good enough excuse for that sort of behavior. We're all insecure, and I really think he's old enough to have discovered the reasons behind his insecurity, and do something about them.
... Lucy

For me, 'Bookends' marks the start of my foray into commercial fiction, away from what has always been thought of as more traditional chick lit - single girl in the city trips around in Manolos looking for Mr. Right.

Going through an illness and then death of a close friend has changed my attitudes to friendship enormously.

When we are tired, everything seems so very much worse.

Put it like this: show me a man who knows how to treat a woman like dirt, and I will faint with delight at his feet and allow him to treat me like the doormat he so clearly wants me to be.

Life is so easy when you are young, she thinks. You can say and do almost anything, safe in the knowledge that an apology will make everything better. The older you get, the more impact those harmful words and deeds have. Once said, those words cannot be unspoken.

You must work to live, not live to work.

Life is where you look, right? I mean look for the bad, you'll find more of the bad, look for the good, you'll find more of the good.

I have a theory that you can tell what the head of a company is like by the people who work there. I knew a publishing house that was run on fear and paranoia, and I felt sorry for everyone who worked there. Needless to say, the person at the helm was not known for kindness, warmth, or grace.

I have only ever been to Antigua to hop over to other Caribbean islands. The airport had always seemed perfectly lovely, but I'm a quiet sort of holiday girl, and Antigua always seemed big.

He was sensitive, quiet. He liked parties that were small and intimate, where you could connect with people, hear one another's thoughts, not parties with roaring music, meat markets where you couldn't hear one another think.

By the time I sat down to write 'Family Pictures,' I hadn't written anything in almost two years, and writing, I have discovered, is a muscle: if it isn't exercised, it will atrophy.

My husband has a cousin who discovered, in his fifties, that the man he thought was his father was actually not, and that he had not only a father he had never met, but brothers.

Luck is not on her side today. It wasn't on her side this morning when she woke up to hear a door slamming downstairs and her husband bel- lowing her name, and it isn't on her side now.

It just feels surreal. Every now and then it kind of hits me, but only for a short while, and then it carries on feeling like it didn't really happen, that he's going to walk in this evening and sit in front of the set drinking beer.

I am Superwoman. I am the author of 15 novels, including one about cancer. I am not, however, someone who 'gets' cancer. I am a sun worshipper who never thought it could happen to me.

I have spent many a night in an Internet chat room, but not since I've been married.