Quotes from Lisa Jewell

There was nothing more worrying than being told there was nothing to worry about when you hadn't been worrying in the first place.

Shit. Sorry. It was on silent,' he mimics her. 'What the sort of mother goes out without telling anyone and leaves their phone on silent?

So here's me, working my-fucking-self to death, day in day out, never spend a penny on anything, not a fucking penny. Single-handedly trying to get us a place to live, and you're just going to the pub with some slag called Keziah who I've never even fucking heard of.

just with friends.

Sophie does a double take. She scrolls through the comments and sees that Lexie's followers are under the impression that these are the doors to her house. That this is her home. And Lexie does nothing to correct these misapprehensions. She lets her followers believe that yes, this is where she lives.

That she needs to stop writing about herself and start writing about the wide world, not just one corner of it. That she is nearly thirty-five and it's time for her to move on. With or without Shaun.

nowhere else to go. She went to her handbag and

People want to do all manner of things, Kim. If it wasn't for people doing things that the likes of you and I would never do, I'd be out of a job.

She hasn't seen Hanna smile for so long she'd forgotten what it looked like.

Although they reflected the parts of himself that he disliked, he didn't dislike them.

There's a heat contained within their exchange, created from the energy of desperation and loss and frustration and misguided hope, but also from the intimacy that's built up between the two of them as everything else has peeled away from them and the thing that unites them.

What a strange people we are, she thinks of her countrymen: where other people take to the shade, to the aircon, stay indoors and close their curtains in the heat, the English hurl themselves at it, like pigs into a furnace.

The idea that Justin had sacrificed his life not for the glamorous refurbished version of Henry Lamb but for the original, slightly crappy version has filled his soul with rightness and substance. Henry Lamb was enough, he'd thought; he didn't need to be anybody else.

Mathilde. She was French. Quite pretty. We kissed

Kim scans it quickly

And there's her email address.

She's very bright. Really very bright. I wouldn't be surprised if she was Mensa level.

Because Zach is a controller and she has to show him that she cannot and will not be controlled and that all the champagne and big, soft eyes and compliments and expensive fish in the world is not going to change that.

no tin of Quality Street or Cadbury's selection boxes.

the police can somehow find out that Henry was responsible for killing Birdie Dunlop-Evers with a single blow to the head a full twenty-six years after the crime was committed, then what else are they capable of uncovering? I am home, she thinks, I am in clean pyjamas in a big soft bed in a luxury apartment block in central London. But I will never ever feel safe, not until I know that the French police are not still looking for me.

Tallulah has not left this room for days now, maybe longer. The edges of Tallulah's days feel ragged and unformed. Scarlett still comes and goes with food and drinks and treats but Tallulah no longer asks her about the outside world because she no longer cares, all she cares about is sleep.

Poppy is basically forty years old, says Floyd admiringly. You know, how you get forty and you suddenly stop giving a shit about all the stupid things you worried about your whole life. Well, Poppy's already there.

All of those messy Christmases, each a perfect gem, all gone, all turned to ash.

And there were breasts absolutely everywhere — hoisted high in push-up bras, tamed and contoured under tight tops in T-shirt bras, firm and unfettered inside tiny dresses. And nearly all paired with minuscule bottoms and tiny taut waists. . . . was having a fabulous pair of breasts a prerequisite in this city? Do they hand them out at Oxford Circus?