Jenny Downham Quotes

I like you," he said.
He made it sound as if she was bound to disagree with him. She nodded. His face said he was telling her something very important.
He said, "I mean it. Whatever happens, you have to believe that.

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That slow smile again. I love that smile! DId I think he was ugly just now? No, his face is transformed.

A fine silver rain, like cobwebs falling.

Don't pretend to care. I don't need you as an anesthetic.

Dust Glitter Rain

Every seven years our bodies change, every cell. Every seven years, we disappear.

Then she says, 'I love you.' Like three drops of blood falling onto snow.

I don't think words reach people. Maybe nothing does

I get a lot of letters, mostly from family members who have been affected by cancer rather than young people themselves. I reply to them all.

We said we'd be friends.'
He looks confused. 'Yeah.'
I don't want to be.'
There's space between us, and in that space there's darkness. I take another step, so close that we share a breath. The same one. In and out.
Tess,' he says. I know it's a warning, but I don't care.
What's the worst thing that can happen?'
It'll hurt,' he says.
It already hurts.'
He nods very slowly. And it's like there's a hole in time, as if everything stops and in this one minute, where we look at each other so close, is spread out between us. As he leans towards me, I feel a strange warmth filtering through me. I forget that my brain is full of every sad face at every window I've ever passed.

I can see inside planes!' he yells. 'Come and look!'
It's difficult climbing in a mini dress ... I haul myself up even though my arms ache. I want to see inside planes too. I want to watch the wind and catch birds in my fist.

Help me, Mikey, she wanted to say. I'm afraid. More afraid than you'd ever believe.' And he'd take her hand and they'd fly across the rooftops and up into space and sit on some planet and watch a double sunrise or maybe a star being born or some other event that no human had ever seen, her head on his shoulder, his arm around her. And she'd tell him everything.

I'd like to go home now,' she said softly. She hoped someone would show her the way.

She shrugs, goes over to the window and looks down at the garden. She circles a finger on the glass, then she says, "Maybe you should try an believe in God."
"Should I?"
"Yeah, maybe we all should. The entire human race.

When he isn't with me, I think ive made him up.

Ill haunt you,' I tell him. 'But from inside. Every time you cough you'll think of me.

She'd never in her whole life bunked school, smoked dope, or kissed a boy whose name she didn't know, and yet in the last few days, she'd done all these things.

I don't give a shit, Dad!"
"Well I do! I absolutely give a shit! This will completely exhaust you."
"It's my body. I can do what I like!"
"So you don't care about your body now?"
"No, I'm sick of it! I'm sick of doctors and needles and blood tests and transfusions. I'm sick of being stuck in a bed day after day while the rest of you get on with your lives. I hate it! I hate all of you! Adam's gone for a university interview, did you know that? He's going to be here for years doing whatever he likes and I'm going to be under the ground in a couple of weeks!

Was this love? Because it hurt. It felt like a bit of glass stuck somewhere important - his heart or his head. And it was throbbing.
Novel You Against Me

I want a big dark room you can barely move in, with bodies grinding close together. I want to hear a thousand songs played incredibly loud. I want to dance so fast that my hair grows long enough to trample on. I want my voice to be thunderous above the throb of bass. I want to get so hot that I have to crunch ice in my mouth.

Is this how it is for everyone?' she whispered.
'No.'
'How do you know?'
'I just do. I've never felt this with anyone before.'
'Serious?'
'Serious. That isn't a line.'
'Kiss me,' she said.
He did. Everywhere.

When I was four I almost fell down the shaft of a tin mine and when I was five the car rolled over on the motorway and when I was seven we went on holiday and the gas ring blew out in the caravan and nobody noticed
I've been dying all my life

If I could buck, I would. If I could howl at the moon, then I would. To feel this, when I'd thought it was
over, when my body's closing down and I thought I'd have no pleasure from it again.
I am blessed.

No, really. I free you.'
I don't want to be free.

I wish I had a boyfriend. I wish he lived in the wardrobe on a coat hanger. Whenever I wanted, I could get him out and he'd look at me the way boys do in films, as if I'm beautiful.

I shrug him off. 'Can't you just go away?
There's a moment. It has a sound in it, as if something very small got broken.

There's a terrible stillness. I notice a small tear in the wallpaper above her shoulder. I notice finger marks grimed on the light switch. Somewhere down in the house, a door opens and shuts. As Zoey turns to face me, I realize that life is made up of a series of moments, each one a journey to the end.

We make patterns, we share moments. Sometimes, I think I'm the only one to see it.

She needed food. Diets didn't count in a crisis.

Cal says that humans are made from the nuclear ash of dead stars. He says that when I die, I'll return to dust, glitter,rain. If thats true, I want to be buried right here under this tree. Its roots will reach into the soft mess of my body and suck me dry. I'll be re-formed as apple blossom. I'll drift down in the spring like confetti and cling to my family's shoes. They'll carry me in their pockets to help them sleep. What dreams will they have then?

I love you. I love you. I send this message through my fingers and into his, up his arm and into his heart. Hear me. I love you. And I'm sorry to leave you.

Day after day it was as if someone had taken my life apart and polished every bit of it really carefully before putting it all back together.

We'll kill him on the green with a five iron.

I lean back on the pillows and look at the corners of the room. When I was a kid, I always wanted to live on the ceiling - it looked so clean and uncluttered, like the top of a cake.

I'm me and you're you, and all of them out there are them. And we're all so different and equally unimportant.

There's a gang of boys on bikes blocking the road ahead. They've got their hoods up, cigarettes shielded. The sky's a really strange colour and there's hardly anyone else about. I slow right down.
"What shall I do?"
"Reverse," Zoey says. "They're not going to move."
I wind down the window. "Oi!" I yell "Move your arses!"
They turn languid, shift lazily to the edge of the road and grin as I blow kisses at them.
Zoey looks stunned, "What's got into you?"
"Nothing- I just haven't learned reversing yet.

I want you to be with me in the dark. To hold me. To keep loving me. To help me when I get scared. To come right to the edge and see what's there.

Sex," I ask her. "What does it mean?"
"Poor you," She say's. "You really did get a crap shag, didn't you?

And in the space he left behind, in the loss of him, she felt an actual physical pain in her belly. She'd lost a friend and she didn't have many of those.

Do you want this to be a love story?

Afterwards, go to a pub for lunch. I've got $260 in my savings account and I really want you to use it for that. Really, I mean it
lunch is on me. Make sure you have pudding
sticky toffee, chocolate fudge cake, ice-cream sundae, something really bad for you. Get drunk too if you like (but don't scare Cal). Spend all the money.
And after that, when days have gone by, keep an eye out for me. I might write on the steam in the mirror when you're having a bath, or play with the leaves on the apple tree when you're out in the garden. I might slip into a dream.
Visit my grave when you can, but don't kick yourself if you can't, or if you move house and it's suddenly too far away. It looks pretty there in the summer (check out the website). You could bring a picnic and sit with me. I'd like that.

Number two on my list is simple. I must say yes to everything for one whole day. Whatever it is and whoever asks it of me.

Simona: Truth doesn't exist?
Katie: ...because everyone's got their own side of a story
...If there's no real truth, then all we can do is offer up our own stories and listen to other people's and try and make sense of it all

I don't want to be dead. I haven't been loved this way for long enough.

Risk your heart it makes things happen. You see if I am right.

The shops in High Street still have their metal grilles down, blank-eyed and sleeping. My name is scrawled across them all. I'm outside Ajay's newsagent's. I'm on the expensive shutters of the health food store. I'm massive on Handie's furniture shop, King's Chicken Joint and the Barbecue Cafe. I thread the pavement outside the bank and all the way to Mothercare. I've possessed the road and am a glistening circle at the roundabout.

I've always wanted to be a cat. Warm and domesticated when you want to be, wild when you don't.

Every breath, every heartbeat, was one less until maybe things stopped hurting this much.

Humans are made from the nuclear ash of dead stars. He says that when I die, I'll return to dust, glitter, rain.

It's utterly beautiful not to know my own edges.

And in bed, deep inside the building, are all the headaches that won't go away. The failed kidneys, the rashes, the ragged-edged moles, the lumps on the breast, the coughs that have turned nasty. In the Marie Curie Ward on the fourth floor are the kids with cancer. Their bodies secretly and slowly being consumed.
And then there's the mortuary, where the dead lie in refrigerated drawers with name tags on their feet.

Hold my hand. Don't let go.

I didn't understand that when you make love, you actually do MAKE love. Stir things. Affect each other. The breath that escapes from me is dazzled. He breathes it in with a gasp.

I made a fatal error thinking he could save me.

It's all right, Tessa, you can go. We love you. You can go now.'
'Why are you saying that?'
'She might need permission to die, Cal.'
'I don't want her to. She doesn't have my permission.

I miss him as soon as he goes. When he isn't with me, I think I made him up.

Nurses never tell you what they know. They're hired for their cheeriness and the thickness of their hair. They need to look alive and healthy, to give the patients something to aim for.

Dad, you played rounders with me, even though you hated it and wished I'd take up cricket. You learned how to keep a stamp collecion because I wanted to know. For hours you sat in hospitals and never, not once, complained. You brushed my hair like a mother should. You gave up work for me, friends for me, four years of your life for me. You never moaned. Hardly ever. You let me have Adam. You let me have my list. I was outrageous. Wanting, wanting so much. And you never said, 'That's enough. Stop now.

Like a tree losing its leaves. I forget even the thing I was thinking.

I love you. It hurts more than anything ever has, but I do. So don't you dare tell me I don't. Don't you ever say it again!

I said I wouldn't leave her.

I imagine horses in the engine, their manes flying, their breaths steaming, their nostrils flaring as they gallop.

Instructions for Dad.

I don't want to go into a fridge at an undertaker's. I want you to keep me at home until the funeral. Please can someone sit with me in case I got lonely? I promise not to scare you.
I want to be buried in my butterfly dress, my lilac bra and knicker set and my black zip boots (all still in the suitcase that I packed for Sicily). I also want to wear the bracelet Adam gave me.
Don't put make-up on me. It looks stupid on dead people.
I do NOT want to be cremated. Cremations pollute the atmosphere with dioxins,k hydrochloric acid, hydrofluoric acid, sulphur dioxide and carbon dioxide. They also have those spooky curtains in crematoriums.
I want a biodegradable willow coffin and a woodland burial. The people at the Natural Death Centre helped me pick a site not for from where we live, and they'll help you with all the arrangements.
I want a native tree planted on or near my grave. I'd like an oak, but I don't mind a sweet chestnut or even a willow. I want a wooden plaque with my name on. I want wild plants and flowers growing on my grave.
I want the service to be simple. Tell Zoey to bring Lauren (if she's born by then). Invite Philippa and her husband Andy (if he wants to come), also James from the hospital (though he might be busy).
I don't want anyone who doesn't know my saying anything about me. THe Natural Death Centre people will stay with you, but should also stay out of it. I want the people I love to ge

It's really going to happen. I really won't ever go back to school. Not ever. I'll never be famous or leave anything worthwhile behind. I'll never go to college or have a job. I won't see my brother grow up. I won't travel, never earn money, never drive, never fall in love or leave home or get my own house.
It's really, really true.
A thought stabs up, growing from my toes and ripping through me, until it stifles everything else and becomes the only thing I'm thinking. It fills me up like a silent scream.

It comes and goes. People think if you're sick you become fearless and brave, but you don't. Most of the time it's like being stalked by a psycho, like I might get shot any second. But sometimes I forget for hours.'
'What makes you forget?'
'People. Doing stuff. When I was with you in the wood, I forgot for a whole afternoon.

Bye, Tess. haunt me if you like. I don't mind.

Don't think you have to be good because you're the only one left. Be as bad as you like.

I don't want to go into a fridge at an undertaker's. I want you to keep me at home until the funeral. Please can someone sit with me in case I get lonely? I promise not to scare you.

I want a magician with a cloak and wand, or a knight with a sword, someone fearless.

I'm going because my life was crap until I met you. I'm going because I don't want to be here when you're not, still living with my mum and nothing being any different. I wouldn't even be thinking about going if it hadn't been for you.

Why do I feel like you're not on my side anymore? Please don't give up on me.

This mad psycho tells everyone to get into a field and says I'm going to pick one of you just one of you
out of all of you to die and everyone's looking around thinking it's so unlikely to be me because there's
thousands of us so statistically it's completely unlikely and the psycho walks up and down looking at
everyone and when he gets near me he hesitates and he smiles and then he points right at me and says
you're the one and the shock that it's me and yet of course it's me why wouldn't it be I knew all along

I'm here. Soon I won't be. Zoey's baby is here. Its pulse tick-ticking. Soon it won't be. And when Zoey comes out of that room, having signed on the dotted line, she'll be different. She'll understand what I already know- that death surrounds us all.
And it tastes like metal between you teeth.

If you want a girl to like you, you have to listen like a woman and love like a man.

What happens if anger takes you over, Tessa? Who will you be then? What will be left of you?

If she planted a seed, she'd have to dig it back up and look at it every day to see if it was growing yet.

She'll understand what I already know - that death surrounds us all. And it tastes like metal between your teeth.

I want to die in my own way. It's my illness, my death, my choice. This is what saying yes means.

Her skin tasted expensive.

I sit up in bed and watch her fiddle about in the back of my wardrobe. I think she's got a plan. That's what's good about Zoey. She'd better hurry up though, because I'm starting to think of things like carrots. And air. And ducks. And pear trees. Velvet and silk. Lakes. I'm going to miss ice. And the sofa. And the lounge. And the way Cal loves magic tricks. And white things- milk, snow, swans.

You want some sweet and lovely things, Tessa, but be careful. Other people can't always give you what you want.

I feel something very small growing inside me as I look at her, and I realize in one absolutely clear moment that I don't like her at all.
'You know what?' I say. 'Forget it. I'll do the list by myself.'
She stands up, swings her stupid hair about and tries to look offended. It's a trick that works with guys, but it makes no difference to the way I feel about her.

When I first saw Ellie, I knew it was her
she was my fantasy. I didn't want it to be true, but every time I met her it was obvious, and the funny thing was that she was better than the fantasy, like I got more stuff than I'd imagined.

. . . my bones they'll burn or bury. It'll be my death.