Quotes from Jill Dawson

That's a rare thing: to love someone, not for how you think of them, but for how they think of themselves.

I never crush a relationship dead, I once boasted. Meaning: I always leave something in case I want to pick it up later.)

You know how I used to joke that your mother had three thousand six hundred and twenty-two feelings and I had the requisite five basic ones which have an evolutionary purpose? Because, quite frankly, most of the time I didn't know what the bloody hell she was on about? Well, since coming round from surgery I'm finding myself having others, another . . . perhaps the sixth emotion.

Yes. Happiness, anxiety, sadness, anger and disgust. It's none of those. So it might be . . . wonder.

It needs time, perspective, to show you that someone might be original.

Why does she always have the moral high ground, what is it about women, always behaving so well and thinking of things we should have thought of first and shaming us?

No one is watching, but you have to leap.

My ex-wife did once accuse me of treating my own needs as if they were instructions and everyone else's needs as impediments.

I'm grateful to her. This habit women have - a role Helen often claimed not to want - of telling me what I'm feeling. Tremendously helpful. Like having an interpreter at hand to translate you to yourself.

People love to believe they're so much better than they are. People who have never been tested, they're so quick to judge. What do they really know about themselves? All I'm saying is this: unless you've been there, found yourself with nothing, nothing but your own talent, you can't tell me you wouldn't do it the same way, too.

Tears make you the villain and the unfeeling one, regardless of what you feel, simply because you can't produce them yourself. And whatever they say, I know women use them to get their own way:

Becoming A Mother: I'm so sorry it was my life you landed in. This is it. This is who you got. I'll do my best.

Maybe I should have known better, but I was a girl, and longing for someone to want me, so back then, the force of his personality, how much he wanted me, was new to me, was the trick and the power; it was dazzling.

You can't just love bits of someone. All of me, why not take all of me----isn't that what the song says? I know exactly how bad Tony can be and well, if he can love me like he does, despite my faults, well... I can do the same for him.