Quotes from Lisa Jewell

I'd been secretly fantasising about you waking up fully restored back to factory settings.

Like I might be about to do something really, really stupid. And knowing I'm going to do it isn't going to stop it from happening.

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

You know, how you get to forty and you suddenly stop giving a shit about all the stupid things you worried about your whole life.

But he's your boyfriend?' 'Partner,' she said, 'he's my partner. I don't own him. He doesn't own me. All that matters is his happiness.' 'Yes,' I said thoughtfully. 'But what about yours?' She didn't reply.

We're all different.

Freedom came in strange forms and from unexpected directions.

It's clearly not a topic he wants to give any oxygen to.

Don't make promises," she says, "just do what you can do. Just be what you can be. However flawed that it is.

room. She stood for a while in the middle, imagining herself not in it anymore, imagining herself instead in her sister's

The concept of a troubled, lonely, middle-class, gay fifty-eight-year-old living alone in dusty squalor in a chocolate-box cottage in the heart of the Cotswolds was a hard one to grasp in the context of his sweaty, noisy, hectic, foreign, red-light existence.

I will see you next week, Mum. And if I don't, then I want you to know that you have been the best and most amazing mother in the world and I have been extraordinarily lucky to have you for so long. And that I adore you. And that we all do. And that you could not have been any better than you were. OK?

They weren't bad books. 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.

Her daughter is dead and her mother is dead and her husband lives with a woman who is nicer than her in a hundred different ways. But she is OK.

Five minutes ago her joys in life had been small, anticipated, longed-for, hard-earned and saved-up-for, inconsequential little splurges that meant nothing in the scheme of things but gave the flat surface of her life enough sparkles to make it worth getting out of bed every morning to go and do a job which she liked but didn't love.

Do not claim that you are anything other than what you are. An evil motherfucking basic bitch. 'My name is Alix Summer.

They say that your powers of memory are at their peak when you're 26, and it's all downhill after that.

But until you've experienced the incredible mix of emotions that a sibling brings to your life it's really very hard to imagine. The love and the hate, the fun and the fights, the rivalry and the kinship. No one else knows your world like a sibling does. They're there, every crap summer holiday, every day off school, every time your parents argue, every boring Christmas Day, every birthday party, they're there. And they are a part of you.

Freddie couldn't help himself sometimes. His dad was just so fucking perfect. Or at least that was the overriding narrative. Amazing Tom Fitzwilliam. Isn't he handsome? Isn't he clever? Isn't he charming? Isn't he tall? Hasn't he got an enormously huge dick? Well, no one had ever actually said that, but he did. Freddie had seen it.

Stories,' she says, 'are the only thing in this world that are real. Everything else is just a dream.

May was like the Friday night of summer:

I'm talking about kids, Mrs. H. Terrible, dreadful, blasted awful kids. They've all got a darkness inside them. They've all got the capacity for evil. Give them free range over a piece of territory, like that out there, and you've got Lord of the Flies. You cannot afford to take your eye off the ball for a second. Not for even a second....

But when it is just me. Alone. With myself—there is no sunshine.

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