Quotes from Lisa Jewell

Ellie's mum always said that May was like the Friday night of summer: all the good times lying ahead of you, bright and shiny and waiting to be lived.

I'm still me, Mum, wherever I go in the world, I'm still just me.

Another drawn-out silence follows and Tallulah waits. Waits to be hit, waits to be screamed at, waits for the anger that exists so close to the tight seams of Zach's psyche finally to burst through.

Another drawn-out silence follows and Tallulah waits. Waits to be hit, waits to be screamed at, waits for the anger that exists so close to the tight seams of Zach's psyche finally to burst through. But it doesn't.

Only 3 percent of the population of the world has green eyes. Her mother had always told her that in an effort to make her feel special.

Men don't know, she thinks, they don't know how having a baby makes you protective of your skin, your body, your space. When you spend all day giving yourself to a baby in every way that it's possible to give yourself to another human being, the last thing you want at the end of the day is a grown man wanting you to give him things too.

a pot of tea on the coffee table.

She can see how this self-possessed child might appear to other children. But she doesn't believe that it's the way it must be; she doesn't believe that Poppy couldn't learn to enjoy time with her peers, to stop rolling her eyes at them and alienating them. She doesn't know, thinks Laurel, she doesn't know that this isn't how you grow up.

Same reason she didn't tell you how hard she found it, being the spare part in your great dynasty. She obviously didn't feel like she could talk to you.

When the children were small, Laurel's mother would occasionally make small, raw observations about gaps between phone calls and visits that would tear tiny, painful strips off Laurel's conscience. I will never guilt trip my children when they are adults, she'd vowed. I will never expect more than they are able to give.

volume down on

letting life show her her journey rather than imposing a journey onto her life

That's the whole bloody trouble with the world. Too weak to love properly. Too weak to be wrong.

But she needed to write it down to make it into a story instead of the truth about her life.

He didn't wait to be formed by the universe. He shaped the universe to his will.

Neither of them were setting the world alight but then whose children did? All those hopes and dreams and talk of ballerinas and pop stars, concert pianists and boundary-breaking scientists. They all ended up in an office. All of them.

The baby is starting to grumble. Kim sits still in her chair and holds her breath. It's taken her all night to get him to sleep. It's Friday, a sultry midsummer night, and normally she'd be out with friends at this time.

And then, just

in the context of a school trip it was as though they'd all just been released from a sensory-deprivation capsule.

I'd subliminally determined at this point that the only ay to really know what was going on in the world was to listen to women talk. Anyone who ignores the chatter of women is poorer by any measure.

All that air," you repeated. "You are funny." "No. I'm just Irish.

And, as any good honeymooners, should – particularly honeymooners who have known each other only a few months – they spent quite a lot of their time having sex.

And she also said that Phoebe was going out with Leo's (the sisters' dad) little brother when she died but also people thought she might have been going out with Leo too even though he was four years older than her! And also that Phoebe is Tyler's mum's sister! So the girl on the bench is actually Tyler's aunt.

She is a mother again at fifty-five. She is making packed lunches in the mornings and writing down term dates in her diary. She is doing two school runs a day and putting someone else before her at every juncture of her life.