Quotes from Lisa Jewell

She has no energy for practicalities. She just wants to keep herself tight inside the bubble … not let life crawl in through the gaps.

when she went from being the sort of girl who drank warm cider with rough boys to the sort of girl who had the love of a real man, who had beautiful babies and a two-bedroom flat. But that girl … that girl is starting to feel like a shapeshifter, a fraud, a one-dimensional paper doll.

It wasn't a suggestion that I was taking up too much of your life; that I was somehow blocking your view of better things. It was an invitation to banter.

Then the light had gone and they'd dissipated like death stars falling away from the sun.

Because if she is right and he is wrong, this podcast could be the making of Alix's professional career.

Parents, melody realized, were the linchpin of normality, even when they were far from normal themselves. Parents, even distracted, slightly ambivalent parents, acted as a kind of strainer through which life got poured. They were there, in essence, to catch the lumpy bits. Without a parent, life felt oblique and directionless. Without a parent, the world was too close for comfort

Now that even the cat was gone, though he'd made a big effort to stay alive for her and lasted until he was almost twenty-one.

She felt a terrible hollowness open up insider her, a sense that she was all alone, that she had in fact always been all alone, that the corners of her life were folding in and folding in and that there was nothing she could do about it.

That's one thing I've learned. If you're with the right people then you're generally in the right place.

You never really know a person until after they're dead. That's when it all comes out. All the stuff they locked up in boxes. All the secrets, all the lies. That's when you really know the truth.

Just stop it. Because the thing is, the longer you tell yourself you're a loser, the more likely it is that that's what people will see you as. And you're not. You're superb.

There was a brief silence. Hardly surprising, as everything in the universe sat on the other side of it.

A WEAK MAN CAN'T LOVE A STRONG WOMAN. HE WON'T KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH HER.

Good morning,' I say. 'I'm DI Samuel Owusu. This is Saffron Brown from our forensics team.' I see Jason Mott trying very hard not to look as if he is excited to be in the presence of two real-life detectives – and failing. 'I hear you have found something. Maybe you could explain?

And so she had stayed. And stayed. And stayed. And the only mistake she was currently in danger of making, she realized, was the mistake of leaving it all far too late.

I remember being twenty-one and thinking that my personality was a solid thing, that me was set in stone, that I would always feel what I felt and believe what I believed. But now I know that me is fluid and shape-changing. So whatever you're feeling now, it's temporary.

But what do you do with an unattainable crush once it's yours to keep? What does it become? Should there perhaps be a word to describe it? Because that's the thing with getting what you want: all that yearning and dreaming and fantasizing leaves a great big hole that can only be filled with more yearning and dreaming and fantasizing.

you do with an unattainable crush once it's yours to keep? What does it become? Should there perhaps be a word to describe it? Because that's the thing with getting what you want: all that yearning and dreaming and fantasizing leaves a great big hole that can only be filled with more yearning and dreaming and fantasizing.

have done my best with what nature gave me. Money can't buy you love but it can buy you a chiselled jaw, perfectly aligned teeth and plumped-up lips.

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.

Too weak to love properly. Too weak to be wrong.

They weren't bad books, Phin countered patiently. 'They were books that you didn't enjoy. It's not the same thing at all. The only bad books are books that are so badly written that no one will publish them. Any book that has been published is going to be a 'good book' for someone.

know, Dom, but God, it's just I need to be so careful. I need this separation period just to pass really, really quietly with no drama and no … things.' 'I still don't understand why you're not just doing a quickie divorce.

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