Jojo Moyes

“So this is it. You are scored on my heart, Clark. You were from the first day you walked in, with your ridiculous clothes and your bad jokes and your complete inability to ever hide a single thing you felt.”

“Believe me, you have to have a certain confidence in your powers of descretion to let a dentist loose with a drill in your mouth less than an hour after you've...um...entertained his wife.”

“Somewhere in this world is a man who loves you, who understands how precious and clever and kind you are. A man who has always loved you and, to his detriment, suspects he always will.”

“I'm not very romantic in real life. I guess love is the thing that makes us do the most extraordinary things—the emotion that can bring us highest or lowest, or be the most transformative—and extremes of emotion are always interesting to write about.”

“ And I don't want to look at you every day, to see you naked,to watch you wandering around the annexe in your crazy dresses and not...not be able to do what I want with you. Oh, Clark,if you had any idea what I want to do to you right now.And I...i can't live with that knowledge. I can't. It's Not who I am. I can't be the kind of man who just...accepts.”

“Just live well. Just live”

“The thing about being catapulted into a whole new life--or at least, shoved up so hard against someone else's life that you might as well have your face pressed against their window--is that it forces you to rethink your idea of who you are. Or how you might seem to other people.”

“And there it was. He knew it, and I knew it. There was nothing left for me to do. Do you know how hard it is to say nothing ? When every atom of you strains to do the opposite? I just tried to be, tried to absorb the man I loved through osmosis, tried to imprint what I had left of him on myself. I did not speak...”

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

“Sometimes, I said, a lie is the way of least pain for everyone.”

“How is it possible to exist with so much pain?”

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

“Sometimes i still think about when we used to fight and I feel really bad because if I'd known what was going to happen to her, I would have tried to be nice to her every day. I say 'try' because it's quite hard to be nice to someone every day. Even my mum gets on my nerves sometimes but I'm always nice to her because I know she's still sad, and because I'm all she has left.”

“I had been wrong when I said Liza McCullen wasn't beautiful: when she smiled she was stunning.”

“I was once told by someone wise that writing is perilous as you cannot always guarantee your words will be read in the spirit in which they were written.”

“But just as nature abhors a vacuum -- so does the human heart.”

“Know that you hold my heart, my hopes, in your hands.”

“If all we are allowed is hours, minutes, I want to be able to etch each of them on to my memory with exquisite clarity so that I can recall them at moments like this, when my very soul feels blackened.”

“That evening she glowed. She gave off a vibration of energy that he suspected only he could detect. Do I do this to you?, he wondered, as he watched her eat. Or is this just the relief of being out from under the forbidden eye of that husband of yours?”

“Ci sono ore normali, e poi ci sono ore invalide, durante le quali il tempo si ferma e scivola via, in cui la vita - la vita reale - sembra scorrere su un binario parallelo.”

“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.”

“Push yourself. Don't Settle. Just live well. Just LIVE.”

“... if you're going to wear a dress like that you need to wear it with confidence. You need to fill it out mentally as well as physically.”

“I wondered if she knew that everything she said made the other person feel like an idiot. I wondered if it was something she'd actually cultivated deliberately. I didn't think I could ever manage to make someone feel inferior.”

“There are normal hours, and then there are invalid hours, where time stalls and slips, where life---real life---seems to exist at one remove.”

“Hey Clark', he said.'Tell me something good'. I stared out of the window at the bright-blue Swiss sky and I told him a story of two people. Two people who shouldn't have met, and who didn't like each other much when they did, but who found they were the only two people in the world who could possibly have understood each other. And I told him of the adventures they had, the places they had gone, and the things I had seen that I had never expected to. I conjured for him electric skies and iridescent seas and evenings full of laughter and silly jokes. I drew a world for him, a world far from a Swiss industrial estate, a world in which he was still somehow the person he had wanted to be. I drew the world he had created for me, full of wonder and possibility.”

“All I can say is that you make me... you make me into someone I couldn't even imagine. You make me happy, even when you're awful. I would rather be with you - even the you that you seem to think is diminished - than with anyone else in the world.”

“Push yourself. Don’t settle. Wear those stripy legs with pride. And if you insist on settling down with some ridiculous bloke, make sure some of this is squirreled away somewhere. Knowing you still have possibilities is a luxury. Knowing I might have given them to you has alleviated something for me.”

“I thought, briefly, that I would never feel as intensely connected to the world, to another human being, as I did at that moment.”

“I see all this talent, all this... this energy and brightness and... potential. Yes. Potential. And I cannot for the life of me see how you can be content to live this tiny life. This life that will take place almost entirely within a five mile radius and contain nobody who will ever surprise you or push you or show you things that will leave your head spinning and unable to sleep at night.”

“He smelt of the sun, as if it had seeped deep into his skin, and I found myself inhaling silently, as if he were something delicious.”

“Sometimes life is a series of obstacles, a matter of putting one foot in front of the other. Sometimes, she realizes suddenly, it is simply a matter of blind faith.”

“There is a whole lot more to life than winning.”

“All that counts is the truth. Without it you're basically just juggling people's daft ideas.”

“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.”

“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 live.”

“And then, just like that, my heart broke. My face crumpled, my composure went and I held him tightly and I stopped caring that he could feel the shudder of my sobbing body because grief swamped me. It overwhelmed me and tore at my heart and my stomach and my head and it pulled me under, and I couldn’t bear it. I honestly thought I couldn’t bear it.”

“I let him know a hurt had been mended in a way that he couldn’t have known, and for that alone there would always be a piece of me indebted to him.”

“Do you know how hard it is to say nothing? When every atom of you strains to do the opposite? I had practiced not saying anything the whole way from the airport, and it was still nearly killing me.”

“I hadn’t realized that music could unlock things in you, could transport you to somewhere even the composer hadn’t predicted. It left an imprint in the air around you, as if you carried its remnants with you when you went.”

“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 know this isn’t a conventional love story. I know there are all sorts of reasons I shouldn’t even be saying what I am. But I love you. I do. I knew it when I left Patrick. And I think you might even love me a little bit.”

“It's complicated.''So's quantitative easing. But I still get that it means printing money.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Some mistakes... Just have greater consequences than others. But you don't have to let the result of one mistake be the thing that defines you. You, Clark, have the choice not to let that happen.”

“It's just that the thing you never understand about being a mother, until you are one, is that it is not the grown man - the galumphing, unshaven, stinking, opinionated off-spring - you see before you, with his parking tickets and unpolished shoes and complicated love life. You see all the people he has ever been all rolled up into one.I look at him and see the baby I held in my arms, dewing besotted, unable to believe that I'd created another human being. I see the toddler, reaching for my hand, the schoolboy weeping tears of fury after being bullied  by some other child. I saw the vulnerabilities, the love, the history.”

“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.”

“Time slowed, and stilled. It was just the two of us, me murmuring in the empty, sunlit room. Will didn't say much. He didn't answer back, or add a dry comment, or scoff. He nodded occasionally, his head pressed against mine, and murmured, or let out a small sound that could have been satisfaction at another good memory."It has been, the best six months of my entire life.""Funnily enough, Clark, mine too."And then, just like that, my heart broke. My face crumpled, my composure went and I held him tightly and I stopped caring that he could feel the shudder of my sobbing body because grief swamped me. It overwhelmed me and tore at my heart and my stomach and my head and it pulled me under, and I couldn't bear it.”

“I'm not going to try and change your mind.""If you're here, you accept it's my choice. This is the first thing I've been in control of since the accident.""I know."And there it was. He knew it, and I knew it. There was nothing left for me to do. Do you know how hard it is to say nothing ? When every atom of you strains to do the opposite? I just tried to be, tried to absorb the man I loved through osmosis, tried to imprint what I had left of him on myself. I did not speak...”