Rosamund Lupton Quotes

All I was allowed to keep for myself was missing you. Which is what? The tears that pricked the inside of my face, the emotion catching at the top of my throat, the cavity in my chest that was larger than I am. Was that all I had now?

I felt caged with loneliness.

When I talk about unrequited love, most of you probably think about romantic love, but there are many other kinds of love that are not adequately returned, if they are returned at all. An angry adolescent may not love her mother back as her mother loves her; an abusive father doesn't return the innocent open love of his young child. But grief is the ultimate unrequieted love. However hard and however long we love someone who has died, they can never love us back. At least that is how it feels ...

Sleep, baby, sleep
Your father tends the sheep
Your mother shakes the dreamland tree
And from it fall sweet dreams of thee
Sleep, baby, sleep.

I threw everything we had together - the strong roots and stems and leaves and beautiful soft blossoms of sisterhood - into the earth with you. And I was left standing on the edge, so diminished by the loss that I thought I could no longer be there.

But my lazy lack of faith, my in-vogue atheism, has taken away the safety net hanging beneath our children's lives.

Ours was a relationship of small talk. We'd never stayed awake long into the night hoping to find in that nocturnal physical conversation a connection of minds. We hadn't stared into each others eyes because if eyes are the window to the soul it would be a little rude and embarrassing to look in. We'd created a ring-road relationship, circumventing raw emotions and complex feelings, so that our central selves were strangers.

Just thinking of your laughter gives me courage ...

A child's body is so much a part of who they are; maybe because we can hold a little boy in our arms. We can hold the whole of him. But when we grow too large to be held our body no longer defines us

Sex & Humour Are The Heart & Lungs Of A Good Relationship

Because you are my sister in every fiber of my being ... but there are aother strands that link us, that wouldn't be seen by even the strongest electron microscope ... We are conjoined by hundreds os thousands of memories that silt down into you and stop being memories and become a part of who you are.

But, astonishingly, I'm not broken. I'm not destroyed. Terrified witless, shaking, retching with fear, yes. But no longer insecure. Because during my search for how you died, I somehow found myself to be a different person ... Living my life. And it wouldn't be my grief for you that toppled the mountain, but love.

A selfish person can still love someone else, can't they? Even when they've hurt them and let them down.

Because I'd rather feel guilty for the rest of my life than for her to have felt a second's fear.

Joie de vivre. Joy and life together. It's such an ironically perfect description of you.

I don't believe outstandingly beautiful and charismatic women create obsession in what would otherwise be normal men, but rather they attract the weirdos and the stalkers; flames in the darkness that these disturbing people inhabit, unwittingly drawing them closer until they extinguish the very flame they were drawn to.

Todd added bourbons to the custards creams on the plate, arranging them in two neat yellow and brown rows, his annoyance expressed through the symmetry of biscuits.

Pan life for gold and you will find it daily.

Because I'd rather fell guilty for the rest of my life than for her to have felt a second's fear - Tess's Mother

I remembered back to leo's burial and holding your hand. I was eleven and you were six, your hand soft and small in mine. As the vicar said 'in sure and certain hope of the resurrection of eternal life' you turned to me, 'I don't want sure and certain hope I want sure and certain Bee.

She'd been cross so much of the time and often about small things. Looking back at herself, she thought that her crossness was like a shapeless overcoat, covering loneliness, and it wasn't the old loneliness she'd felt after her mother died, or even an adult version of it, but something different and more punishing.

Your paintings are staggeringly beautiful. Did I ever tell you that,or was I just too concerned that you weren't going to earn a living? I know the answer ... I worried that the paint was so thickly applied that it might snap off and ruin someone's carpet, rather than realizing that you'd made color itself tactile.

I'm a sliver-thin light, diamond sharp, that can slip through gaps in the world we know. I will come into your dreams and speak soft words when you think of me. There is no happy ever after - but there is an afterwards.
This isn't our ending.

For years I had a fantasy of a happy-ever-after ending. The first night I spent at the university my fantasy ended, because I thought a happy-ever-after was pointless. Because with my father I didn't want to hope for a happy ending but to have had a happy beginning. I wanted to have been looked after by Daddy in childhood, not finding resolution with my father as an adult.

When someone dies they can be any age you remember can't they ' she asked. As I tried to think of a reply she continued 'You probably think about the grown-up Tess because you were still close to her. But when I woke up I thought of her when she was three wearing a fairy skirt I'd got her in the Woolworth's and a policeman's helmet. Her wand was a wooden spoon. On the bus yesterday I imagined holding her when she was two days old. I felt the warmth of her. I remembered all her fingers clasped around my finger so tiny they didn't even meet. I remembered the shape of her head and stroking the nape of her neck till she slept. I remembered her smell. She smelled of innocence. Other times she's thirteen and so pretty that I worry for her everytime I see a man look at her. All of those Tesses is my daughter.

And I felt closer to you. Because you knew me so much better than I'd realized - and still loved me.

There was no harbor for hope.

Instead of imagining the frightening and the ugly, I will try to find the beautiful in everyday things.

My job isn't to go around judging people. Priests are meant to teach love and forgiveness. That to me is the essence of being a Christian. And trying to find that love and forgiveness in ourselves and others every day should be a challenge that we want to achieve.

I wanted to make him understand that we shared the details of our lives, because they were the threads that braided us so closely together. And you would have been certain to tell me about a Sabatier knife, because it would have had the rare value of being a detail in your life which tied directly into mine - Bee in Sister

Things are embarrassing, best to avoid them. But since your death I prefer a naturalist style of conversation. Let's strip it down to what matters. Let's have emotions and beliefs on show without the modest covering of small talk.

It's not the fledgling birds that are thrown out of the nest by their parents and made to fly; it's the parents who are made to get the hell out of cozy family nest by their teenage offspring. It's we who are made to be independent of them, crash-landing if we don't manage it.

Mums answer is so unexpected and I am a litte stunned, actually. I wonder whether, had I known the reason for my name as a child, I would have tried to live up to it. Instead of being a failed Arabella, I might have become a Shakespearean plucky Beatrice.

You were right. As you know. Other people may sail through lives of blue seas, with only the occasional squall, but for me life has always been a mountain
sheer faced and perilous. And, as I think I told you, I had clung on with the footholds and crampons and safety ropes of a safe job and flat and secure relationship.

Mum said no one has ever called me by my first name so I've always assumed that even as a baby they could tell I wasn't an Arabella, a name with loops and flourishes in black-inked calligraphy; a name that contains within it girls called Bella or Bells or Belle - so many beautiful possibilities. No, from the start I was clearly a Beatrice, sensible and unembellished in Times New Roman, with no one hiding inside.

There is no new beginning. No second chance.
You turned to me and I wasn't there.
You are dead. If I had taken your call, you would be alive.
It's as blunt as that.
I'm sorry.

She pans life for gold and finds it daily.

Your coffin reached the monstrous hole. And a part of me went down into the muddy earth with you and lay down next to you and died with you.

Sex and laughter. The heart and lungs of a relationship.

Been united by superficial tendrils of the small and the mundane, but the enormous fact of your death was ripping each fragile connection. I said

Our mind is who we are; it's where we feel and think and believe. It's where we have love and faith and hate and passion.

I hadn't understood funeral pyres before, but now I do. It's ghastly to burn someone you love but watching the smoke going into the sky, I think that's rather beautiful now. And I wish Tess could be up in the sky. Somewhere with color and light and air.