Quotes from Jojo Moyes

If you cannot fix it," he says, "maybe you have to look at it differently.

She had once been told by her favorite aunt that the best way to get through life was not to dwell on things so she packed those events into a suitcase, and shoved it to the back of a mental cupboard, just as she had done with numerous suitcases before.

I wondered if she knew that everything she said made the other person feel like an idiot. I wondered if it was something she'd actually cultivated deliberately. I didn't think I could ever manage to make someone feel inferior.

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under the heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance.

The difference between growing up like me and growing up like Will was that he wore his sense of entitlement lightly. I think if you grow up as he had done, with wealthy parents, in a nice house, if you go to good schools and nice restaurants as a matter of course, you probably just have this sense that good things will fall into place, that your position in the world is naturally an elevated one.

This time the silence was painful. I heard my voice slowly swallowed by it, and couldn't work out what to do with my hands.

I looked at Will and I saw the baby I held in my arms, dewily besotted, unable to believe that I had created another human being. I saw the toddler, reaching for my hand, the schoolboy weeping tears of fury after being bullied by some other child. I saw the vulnerabilities, the love, the history.

So this is it. You are scored on my heart, Clark. You were from the first day you walked in, with your ridiculous clothes and your bad jokes and your complete inability to ever hide a single thing you felt. You changed my life so much more than this money will ever change yours. Don

It's not a matter of giving you a chance. I've watched you these six months becoming a whole different person, someone who is only just beginning to see her possibilities. You have no idea how happy that has made me. I don't want you to be tied to me

thought about the fact that there seemed to be such a high cost to anything a woman chose to do with her life, unless she simply aimed low.

And I pressed send, realizing, as it whooshed into the ether, that I had now condemned myself to unknown hours of e-mail-related anxiety while I waited for him to respond

But I want him to live if he wants to live. If he doesn't, then by forcing him to carry on, you, me—no matter how much we love him—we become just another shitty bunch of people taking away his choices." Nathan

marriage, they say, halves one's rights and doubles one's duties.

He could be happy, if surrounded by the right people, if allowed to be Will, instead of The Man in the Wheelchair, the list of symptoms, the object of pity. And

Apart from an exotic taste in clothes, and the fact that I'm a bit short, there's not a lot separating me from anyone you might pass in the street. You probably wouldn't look at me twice. An ordinary girl, leading an ordinary life. It actually suited me fine.

Those few seconds were the longest I could remember.

The men were less interesting to look at, but nearly all had that air about them that I could sometimes detect in Will--of wealth and entitlement, a sense that life would settle itself agreeably around them.

That some things are a gift, even if you don't get to keep them. Maybe just to know that something this beautiful exists is all we can really ask for.

Perhaps we all harbor a perverse need to get close to the things that might destroy us.

Hey Clark', he said.'Tell me something good'. I stared out of the window at the bright-blue Swiss sky and I told him a story of two people. Two people who shouldn't have met, and who didn't like each other much when they did, but who found they were the only two people in the world who could possibly have understood each other.

Be thrown into a new life (or at least thrown with sush force against the life of someone who is like squashed his face against the window) forces you to rethink who you are. Or what causes impression for others

Because even if the whole world was throwing rocks at you, if you still had your mother or father at your back, you'd be okay.

Did you say the stars were worlds, Tess?" "Yes." "All like ours?" "I don't know, but I think so. They sometimes seem to be like the apples on our stubbard-tree. Most of them splendid and sound—a few blighted." "Which do we live on—a splendid one or a blighted one?" "A blighted one." • THOMAS HARDY, Tess of the D'Urbervilles

But mostly I felt filled with horror. I was haunted by what I now knew. How could you live each day knowing that you were simply whiling away the days until your own death? How could this man whose skin I had felt that morning under my fingers – warm, and alive – choose to just extinguish himself? How could it be that, with everyone's consent, in six months' time that same skin would be decaying under the ground?