Quotes by Jojo Moyes

Because even if the whole world was throwing rocks at you, if you still had your mother or father at your back, you’d be okay. Some deep-rooted part of you would know you were loved. That you deserved to be loved.

I hadnt thought that 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 then when you were rudely shocked into consciousness by the alarm. That you might miss the people you worked with, no matter how little you had in common with them. Or even that you might find yourself searching for familiar faces as you walked the high street.

You learn to live with it, with them. Because they do stay with you, even if they’re not living, breathing people any more.It’s not the same crushing grief you felt at first, the kind that swamps you, and makes you want to cry in the wrong places, and get irrationally angry with all the idiots who are still alive when the person you love is dead.It’s just something you learn to accommodate.Like adapting around a hole. I don’t know. It’s like you become … a doughnut instead of a bun

How could I explain to this girl what Will and I had been to each other,the way I felt that no person in the world had ever understood me like he did or ever would again?How could she understand that losing him was like having a hole shot straight through me, a painful, constant reminder, an absence I could never fill?

Because even if the whole world was throwing rocks at you, if you still had your mother or father at your back, you’d be okay.

Its 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 Id 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.

Some mistakes... just have greater consequences than others. But you dont have to let that night be the thing that defines you.

I thought the world had actually ended. I thought nothing good could ever happen again. I thought anything might happen if I wasnt vigilant. I didnt eat. I didnt go out. I didnt want to see anyone. But I survived, Paul. Much to my own surprise, I got through it. And life...well, gradually became livable again.

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. 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. And as I spoke I knew these would be the most important words I would ever say and that it was important that they were the right words, that they were not propaganda, an attempt to change his mind, but respectful of what Will had said. I told him something good...

And it was suddenly very simple: There was no choice.

You dont have to let that one thing be the thing that defines you.

It is important not to turn the dead into saints. Nobody can walk in the shadow of a saint.

But I knew very well how the persona you chose to present to the world could be very different from what was inside.I knew how grief could make you behave in ways you couldn’t even begin to understand.

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

She is probably slightly too old to pout, but theyve been going out a short enough time for it still to be cute.

Your face when you came back from diving that time told me everything; there is a hunger in you, Clark. A fearlessness. You just buried it, like most people do.

I could barely even say Wills 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. Id 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?

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

There are normal hours, and then there are invalid hour, when time stalls and slips, when life -real life- seems to exist at one remove

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