Louise Doughty Quotes

Read. Read as if your life depended on it because your life as a novelist does.

station, heavily: still no

Love built on pain-the kind that lasts: whatever you love can be taken away from us at any moment but the loss of what we love belongs to us forever.

Writing gets easier once you know your allies and banish your enemies.

There's a certain sort of a man whose every charm lies in his predictability.

We discovered that safety and security are commodities you can sell in return for excitement but you can never buy them back.

It must be every barrister's nightmare, something that finds him or her unprepared.

I think I have become a better writer since having children. It improves creativity, particularly because once you have children it makes you realise the story isn't about you.

Before my daughter was lost to me, I might have attributed his apparent stillness and control to a lack of feeling, but now I know, to my cost, that appearing unfeeling is the price we sometimes pay for being able to speak at all.

You should remind yourself that what you love is mortal, that what you love is not your own. It is granted to you the present while, and not irrevocably, nor for ever, but like a fig or a bunch of grapes in the appointed season and if you long for it in the winter, you are a fool.

The first day without you is painful in a way that is almost exquisite. I imagine quitting smokers must feel like this, or crash-dieters - the early determination, where the loss of what you have given up is replaced with the adrenaline of denial.

How many times in a life does a person get to feel an instant attraction for someone one has just met, the eyes locking, the sudden and overwhelming conviction that this is someone he or she is meant to know?

Muscle has memory: the body knows things the mind will not admit.