Jane Green

“Sometimes I think it’s me. I think I must be doing something wrong, giving out subliminal messages so they can smell the desperation, read the neon lights on my forehead . . . “KEEP AWAY FROM THIS WOMAN, SHE IS LOOKING FOR COMMITMENT,” but most of the time I think it’s them. Bastards. All of them.”

“It's all well and good saying you avoid pain by avoiding relationships, but what about the wonderful things you're avoiding as well? What about the joy and the intimacy and the trust that come with finding someone you love?”

“But the thing is, since I've met someone, everyone started banging on and on about my not-so-secret admirer. I'd started to find it quite exciting. I'd forgotten that I don't get involved because the pain might not be worth it. All that flattery and attention distracted me from any pain that might have been lurking around the corner. But course, the pain got me in the end. It always does.”

“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.”

“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?”

“I don't need Mr. Perfect...I already have you.”

“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.”

“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 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.”

“When a man only rings you late at night, when he only wants to see you late at night, when he doesn't take you out for dinner, or introduce you to his friends, or spend any time or attention on you, then this is not a relationship. This is sex.”

“I sigh and look at her. 'I must have been mad taking you on as a friend'. ' What are you talking about?' she grins. 'You didn't take me on. I chose you'.”

“Fantasies are absolutely safe, as long as you never try to make them a reality.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Im used to being adored, but i have no interest in being adored. If you want me to fall in love with you, ignore me, pique my interest by being completely uninterested.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“She hadn't realised how low her self esteem had been, first during her relationship, when she tried to turn herself into someone else, and then when recovering from the break up.Because however much she was a part of the decision to break up, she still felt bruised and battered, never thought she'd have the energy to go through all this again with someone new.It has been so much easier, since they separated, to be cocooned with her family, to nest in her cosy home and allow life to carry on for others, outside the safety of her house.”

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

“I only seem to attract losers, cute losers, but I've just never been able To resist that lethal combination of black hair and green eyes.”

“A cougar is a sexually active and confident woman who's a predator. Tell me you not flattered.”

“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”

“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. ”

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

“Where there is life, there is hope.”

“They had always dreamed of a large family but have now realized that they would be equally blessed to have even one child.”

“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.”

“You are the best person I've met in years, and if I'd met you in a year's time, or maybe even a few months, I know we could be happy together, but I can't give you what you need.”

“Nothing in this world happens without a reason. That we are all exactly where we are supposed to be, and that the pieces of the puzzle have a tendency to come together when you least expect it.”

“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. ”

“Anyone can live in a house, but homes are created with patience, time and love.”

“As Carrie Fisher once said in a film, everyone thinks they have good taste and a sense of humour.”

“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”

“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. ”

“Every time my dreams threaten to become reality, something always happens and I end up alone.”

“Covers, so many covers, so many different, delectable pictures, and although, metaphorically speaking, it is the thing I hate most, when it comes to literature I always judge books by their covers. First the cover will catch my eye, then I read the back of the book, and then finally the first page.”

“... 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.”

“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. ”

“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”

“Marriage should be about fun,” she says gently. “It’s about friendship, and laughter, and trust, and fun. If it’s not fun, if you take it all too seriously, what’s the point? You know I’ve been with Andy for fifteen years, and the reason it still works is because he’s my best friend and he still makes me laugh. Admittedly, not all the time, and often we get completely bogged down in work, and the kids, and life, but he’s still the person I most want to phone when anything happens in life, and he’s still the person who makes me laugh the most.”

“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.”

“Jules says there are three things that make you a grown-up: an eight-piece set of matching dishes; gin, vodka and whiskey in the house; and making your bed every morning. I disagree with her. I think you're officially a grown-up when you've got another half. When you don't have to live in fear of other couples. When you don't have to feel you're not good enough.”

“Jules has always been one of those women that men go crazy about because she has enough self-confidence to say this is me, take it or leave it. And, invariably, they take it. Or at least try to. They love the fact that she doesn’t wear makeup. That her clothes, on her tiny, petite frame, are a mishmash of whatever she happens to pull out of the wardrobe that morning. That her laugh is huge and infectious, and, most of all, that she listens. She loves life, and people, and makes time for them, and even before Jamie came along men were forever falling in love with her.”

“And suddenly I realize that although I've never thought about being in love with Nick before, all the right ingredients are there. I fancy him. I like him. He's my friend. He makes me laugh. I love being with him. And I start to feel all sort of warm and glowy, and screw the other stuff. Screw the stuff about him having no money, and living in a bedsit, and not being what I thought I wanted. I'm just going to go with this and see where it ends up. I mean, no one says I have to marry the guy, for God's sake.”

“I want someone who will adore me so much that they cannot even walk past me without touching me in some way. I want someone who will worship me, even when.. I'm sitting around in fluffy slippers with no makeup on and hair scraped back.I'm sick and tired of being on my own. Most of the time I'm fine. Some of the time I even quite enjoy it. But at this precise moment in time I'm fed up with it. I've had enough..”

“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.”

“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.”