Jojo Moyes Quotes

Sometimes the illusion of happiness could inadvertently create it.

But don't blame me for the food. My wife knows a hundred and one ways to incinerate a cow, and as far as I can tell she's still experimenting.

It's like I'm looking through a funnel, she had said, gazing at his newborn form. The world has just shrunk to me and him.

She thinks, briefly, that she has never felt so lonely in her life.

When you looked at me with those limitless, deliquescent eyes of yours, I used to wonder what it was you could possibly see in me. Now I know that is a foolish view of love. You and I could no more not love each other than the earth could stop circling the sun.

Marriage is a decades-long experiment, conducted mostly in private; a test of will in the face of unexpected obstacles.

I thought of Will telling me if I didn't stop bloody whistling he'd be forced to run me over.

Will's eyes locked onto mine and despite everything,

I could barely even say Will's name. And listening to their tales of family relationships, of thirty-year marriages, shared houses, lives, children, I felt like a fraud. I had been a carer for someone for six months. I'd loved him, and watched him end his life. How could these strangers possibly understand what Will and I had been to each other during that time? How could I explain the way we had so swiftly understood each other, the shorthand jokes, the blunt truths and raw secrets? How could I convey the way those short months had changed the way I felt about everything? The way he had skewed my world so totally that it made no sense without him in it?

I like your thinking."
"I like your everything."
"We seem to spend a lot of time talking rubbish to each other."
"Well, I like that too.

That's the thing you don't know about children unless you have them - bath time, Lego, and fish fingers don't allow you to dwell on tragedy for too long.

Do you know something?" I could have looked at his face all night. The way his eyes wrinkled at the corners. That place where his neck met his shoulder. "What?" "Sometimes, Clark, you are pretty much the only thing that makes me want to get up in the morning.

Maybe he talks through one of those devices. Like that scientist bloke. The one on The Simpsons.

You are scored on my heart.

Didn't you ever love anything that much?

You never know what will happen when you fall from a great height.

Best before: 19 March 2007

Conned any other women out of their valuables lately ?" she says quietly, so quietly that only he will hear it.
"Nope. I've been too busy stealing handbags and seducing the vulnerable."
Her head shoots up and his eyes lock on hers. He is, she sees with some shock, as furious as she is.

secured in the back, and his smart jacket hung neatly over

Mr Traynor's a nice man. And I wouldn't have brought you here if I thought it wouldn't go well.'

'If he doesn't like me, can we just leave? Like, really quickly?'

'Of course.'

'I'll know. Just from how he looks at me.'

'We'll skid out on two wheels if necessary.

Nobody ever says "sweet girl" about someone they were in love with. It's like the whole "we'll still be friends" thing. It means you didn't feel enough.'
He was briefly amused. 'So what would I have said if I had been in love with her?'
'You would have looked very serious, and said, "Karen. Complete nightmare," or shut down and gone all "I don't want to talk about it.

My phone, strolled downstairs for too-strong hospital

I thought about Patrick, and the fact that even as I had collected my things from his flat, [...] my sadness was never the crippling thing I should have expected. I didn't feel desolete, or overwhelmed, or any of the things you should feel when you split apart a love of several years. I felt quite calm, and a bit sad and perhaps a little guity - both at my part in the split, and the fact that I didn't feel the things I probably should.

We are all part of some great cycle, some pattern that it was only God's purpose to understand.

When you put someone down all the time, eventually they stop listening to the sensible stuff.

We seem to live in an age where we are quietly appalled by the idea of appetites, whether they be for sex, food or diamonds.

Financial and energy-sapping struggle, was that being a parent on your own when you were totally out of your depth was actually the loneliest place on earth.

Vicariously,'" she said slowly. "You'll have to tell me what that means, Anthony." The way she said his name induced a kind of intimacy. It promised something, a repetition in some future time. "It means" - Anthony's mouth had dried - "it means pleasure gained through the pleasure of someone else.

It could be oddly dispiriting, the blank refusal of humankind to even attempt to function responsibly.

Felt an almost umbilical pull toward home, the comfort offered by a conventional family and a traditional Sunday lunch.

She had the world's worst poker face: her feelings floated across them like reflections on a still pond.

Teenagers are basically toddlers with hormones - old enough to want to do stuff without having any of the common sense.

How could I explain to this man how much I wanted to work? Did he have the slightest idea how much I missed my old job? ... I had never considered that you might miss a job like you missed a limb
a constant, reflexive thing.

Losing him was like having a hole shot straight through me, a painful, constant reminder, an absence I could never fill.

It wasn't that Ed would make it okay
he had his own problems to deal with
but somehow the sum of them added up to something better. They would make it okay.

But ... sometimes, Louisa, moving on means we do have to protect ourselves.

My voice, when it emerged, cracked a little. I'm not in love with a ghost.

Some lives work better with routines, and Liv Halston's is one of them. Every weekday morning she rises at seven thirty am, pulls on her trainers, grabs her iPod, and before she can think about what she's doing, she heads down, bleary-eyed, in the rackety lift, and out for a half hour run along the river. At some point, threading her way through the grimly determined commuters, swerving round reversing delivery vans, she comes fully awake, her brain slowly wrapping itself around the musical rhythms in her ears, the soft thud-thud-thud of her feet hitting the pavement. Most importantly she has steered herself away again from a time she still fears: those initial waking minutes, when vulnerability means that loss can still strike her unheralded and venal, sending her thoughts into a toxic black fog. She had begin running after she had realized that she could use the world outside, the noise in her earphones, her own motion, as a kind of deflector, Now it has become habit, and insurance police. I do not have to think. I do not have to think. I do not have to think.

Don't think of me too often ... Just live well. Just live

I looked at my boyfriend and wondered if he was actually an alien.

I was distracted by the secrets of a new world. In the silence, broken only by the exaggerated oosh shoo of my own breath, I watched shoals of tiny iridescent fish, and larger black-and-white fish, that stared at me with blank, inquisitive faces, and gently swaying anemones filtering the gentle currents of their tiny, unseen haul. I saw distant landscapes twice as brightly colored and varied as they were above land. I saw caves and hollows where unknown creatures lurked, distant shapes that shimmered in the rays of the sun.

Writers divide fairly cleanly into those who only work through what they hear and those who are more visual. I am the latter, where I lie down on my office floor and play scenes through my head to - cinematically, several times with different elements - to see what works. I can't write a scene until I can see it.

moving on means we have to protect ourselves.

Love is the driver for all great stories: not just romantic love, but the love of parent for child, for family, for country.

you know", she said, "when you get to my age, the pile of regrets becomes so huge it can obscure the view terribly

It was as if I had lost a layer of skin - I woke up laughing, or crying.

Some mistakes have greater consequences then others. You don't have to let one mistake define you

A stylish person, for me, is one who draws your eye without necessarily being showy; they wear clothes that are beautifully cut, flatter the wearer, and show that they are not impervious to fashion, but not a slave to it either.

I think there is an awful lot of technology for technology's sake. I have yet to be convinced by my husband that persuading our mobiles to talk to our computers is going to be quicker and more straightforward than scribbling a note in our kitchen diary.

Its not a matter of giving you a chance. I've watched you these six months becoming a whole different person, someone who is only just beginning to see her possibilities. You have no idea how happy that has made me. I don't want you to be tied to me, to my hospital appointments, to the restrictions on my life. I don't want you to miss out on the things someone else could give you.

I believe that when two people are in love, the way that we are in love, the love lasts, whatever else happens.

I often ordered chips, just so that I could watch them all pretend they didn't want one.

silver-framed photographs

Divorced? I'm a good Catholic girl, Louisa. We don't divorce. We just make our men suffer for all eternity.

How could I convey the way those short months had changed the way I felt about everything? The way he had skewed my world so totally that is made no sense without him

I told myself firmly that it was just a feeling, the echo of an anxiety. I could overcome it, just as I would overcome everything else.

Sometimes when you get hammered till the small hours you feel pretty good in the morning, but really it's just because you're still a bit drunk. That old hangover is just toying with you, working out when to bite.

The young are right to be fearless, she reminded herself. Remember yourself at that age.

I always think this is the kind of place that people come back to. When they've become tired of everything else. Or when they don't have enough imagination to go anywhere else.

Beside me Sam had started to shake silently. "Stop them," he murmured. "I'm going to bust my stitches.

I placed my face so close to his that his features became indistict, and I began to lose myself in them. I stroked his hair, his skin, his brow, with my fingertips, tears sliding unchecked down my cheeks, my nose against his, and all the time he watched me silently, studying me intently as if he were storing each molecule of me away. He was already retreating withdrawing to somewhere I couldn't reach him.
I kissed him, trying to bring him back. I kissed him and let my lips rest against his so that our breath mingled and the tears from my eyes became salt on his skin, and I told myself that, somewhere, tiny particles of him would become tiny particles of me, ingested, swallowed, alive perpetual. I wanted to press every bit of me against him. I wanted to will something into him. I wanted to give him every bit of life I felt and force him to life.
I held him, Will Traynor ex-City whiz kid, ex-stunt diver, sportsman, traveller, lover. I held him close and said nothing, all the while telling him silently that he was loved. Oh, but he was loved.

I had never considered that you might miss a job like you missed a limb
a constant, reflexive thing. I hadn't thought as well as the obvious fears about money, and your future, losing your job would make you feel inadequate, and a bit useless. That it would be harder to get up in the morning than you were rudely shocked in to consciousness by the alarm. That you might missed the people you worked with, no matter how little you had in common with them.

She went kind of pink and laughed, the kind of laugh you do when you know yo shouldn't be laughing. The kind of laugh that spoke of a conspiracy.

Do you think they vacuum every day, like we do?

It was indeed a gift to have someone to love.

He doesn't have to actually do anything, but it's about widening his horizons, right? We

Bringing in an old woman with breathing problems, caught

I told him I loved him," she said, her voice dropping to a whisper. "And he just said it wasn't enough." Her eyes were wide and bleak . "How am I supposed to live with that?

He smelled of warm, sleepy male. She had forgotten what a weirdly potent scent that was.

It never ended. Even though she'd thought she'd covered her heart with a permanent porcelain shell, he still found a way to chip at it.

He kissed her, and knew he was trying to tell her the depth of how he felt. Even as he lost himself in her, felt her hair sweep across his face, his chest, her lips meet his skin, her fingers, he understood that there were people for whom one other was their missing part.

We were enjoying one of those rare summers of utter freedom – no financial responsibility, no debts, no time owing to anybody.

Sometimes she woke up speaking his name.
Sometimes she wondered how it were possible to be so far from the sea and still feel as if she were drowning.

Three days later, just as I set off for work, the postman handed me a letter. I opened it on the bus, thinking it might be an early birthday card from some distant cousin. It read, in computer- ized text:
Dear Clark,
This is to show you that I am not an entirely selfish arse. And I do appreciate your efforts.
Thank you.
Will
I laughed so hard the bus driver asked me if my lottery numbers had come up.

I know I shouldn't be," he murmured, "but I woke up really happy." His face scanned hers. "I mean, like, really, stupidly happy. Like even though my whole life is a disaster, I just ... I feel okay. I look at you, and I feel okay.

She swore loudly and slammed the rig into reverse, steering it round the garage,

I realized I was afraid of living without him. How is it you have the right to destroy my life, I wanted to demand of him, but I'm not allowed a say in yours?
But I had promised.

You have to decide to let yourself be happy.

Why do women always have to go over and over a situation until it becomes a problem?

we laughed awkwardly, in the way British people do when they are experiencing great emotion.

How come you always make everything better?'
'I just don't like seeing you sad.

With Will I had never had to consider what I said; talking to him was as effortless as breathing. Now I was good at not really saying anything about myself at all.

I can't do this because I can't ... I can't be the man I want to be with you. And that means that this - this just becomes ... another reminder of what I am not.

And I ate the cheesecake.

No journey out of grief was straightforward. There would be good days and bad days.

If she knows you didn;t love her enough to stay here for her, it will finish her off.

She has drunk a lot. There have been at least three glasses since she got here, and there were many more back at the bar. But she has reached that rare, pleasant state of alcoholic equilibrium. She is not drunk enough to feel sick or woozy. She is just merry enough to be suspended, floating in this pleasurable moment.

I saw that pretty much everyone bore the brutal imprint of love, whether it was lost, whipped away from them, or simply vanished into a grave.

When he saw the content of my MP3 player one afternoon, he laughed so hard he nearly dislodged one of his tubes.

There were many ways in which I disliked my sister. A few years ago I could have shown you whole scribbled lists I had written on that very topic. I hated her for the fact that she's got thick, straight hair, while mine breaks off if it grows beyond my shoulders. I hated her for the fact that you can never tell her anything that she doesn't already know. I hated her for the fact that for my whole school career teachers insisted on telling me in hushed tones how bright she was, as if her brilliance wouldn't mean that by default I lived in a permanent shadow. I hated her for the fact that at the age of twenty-six I lived in a box room in a semidetached house just so she could have her illegitimate son in with her in the bigger bedroom.

Time seemed to have stretched and become meaningless anyway, its passage blurred by endless drinks and meandering conversations.

But his smile was slow and wide. I don't know, Clark. Some people just won't be told.

I had been a magistrate for almost eleven years. I watched the whole of human life come through my court: the hopeless waifs who couldn't get themselves together sufficiently even to make a court appointment on time; the repeat offenders; the angry, hard-faced young men and exhausted, debt-ridden mothers. It's quite hard to stay calm and understanding when you see the same faces, the same mistakes made again and again. I could sometimes hear the impatience in my tone. It could be oddly dispiriting, the blank refusal of humankind to even attempt to function responsibly. And

And I thought that even before I had sex with him.

I thought he was the saddest person I had ever met, in those moments when I glimpsed him staring out the window.

Okay, how's this? Margery O'Hare, I solemnly promise never to marry you."
"And?"
"And I won't talk about marrying you. Or sing songs about it. Or even think about marrying you."
"Better."
H glanced around him, then lowered his voice, placing his mouth beside her ear so that she squirmed a little. "But I will stop by and do sinful things to that fine body of yours. If you'll allow me."
"How sinful?" She whispered.
"Oh. Bad. Ungodly."
She slid her hand inside his overalls, feeling the faint sheen of sweat on his warm skin. For a moment it was just the two of them. The sounds and scents of the mine receded, and all she could feel was the thumping of her heart, the pulse of his skin against hers, the ever-present drumbeat of her need for him. "God loves a sinner, Sven." She reached up and kissed him, then delivered a swift bite to his lower lip.
"But not as much as I do.

I was so furious, you see, that all around me were things that could move and bend and grow and reproduce and my son - my vital, charismatic, beautiful boy - was just this thing. Immobile, wilted, bloodied, suffering. Their beauty seemed like an obscenity. I screamed and I screamed and I swore - words I didn't know I knew - until Steven came out and stood, his hand resting on my shoulder, waiting until he could be sure that I would be silent again. He didn't understnad, you see. He hadn't worked it out yet. That Will would try again. That our lives would be spent in a state of constant vigilance, waiting for the next time, waiting to see what horror he could inflict upon himself. We would have to see the world through his eyes - the potential poisons, the sharp objects, the inventiveness with which he could finish the job that damned motorcyclist had started. Our lives had to shrink to fit around the potential for that one act. And he had the advantage - he had nothing else to think about, you see ? Two weeks later, I told Will, "Yes". Of course I did. What else could I have done ?

Margaret laughed. "Sure thing. Sorry, Ave. I'll go and get the tea." Ave. If Avice had been feeling less awful, she would have corrected her: there was nothing worse than an abbreviated name.

It was not, they observed with exquisite understatement, a cry for help.

You only get one life. It's actually your duty to live it as fully as possible.