Quotes from Jojo Moyes

Their eyes met, and in those few silent moments, he told her everything. He told her that she was the most astonishing thing he had ever encountered. He told her that she haunted his waking hours, and that every feeling, every experience he had in his life up to that point was flat and unimportant to the enormity of this. He told her he loved her.

Books are what teach you about life. Books teach you empathy.

Take him to you, if you must, my love, but don't love him. Please don't love him.

You live. And you throw yourself into everything and try not to think about the bruises.

Our eyes locked. And in that moment everything shifted. I saw what I had really done. I saw that I could be somebody's center, his reason for staying. I saw that I could be enough.

I was twenty-six years old and I wasn't really sure about what I was. You probably wouldn't look at me twice. An ordinary girl, leading an ordinary life. It actually suited me fine.

It was only when I got home that I reached into my pocket. I found a piece of paper he must have slipped in there while he held me: a little caricature of the two of us, him a huge bear in his uniform, grinning, his arm around me, petite and narrow-waisted, my face straight and solemn, my hair pulled neatly behind my head. Underneath it he had written, in his looping,'I never knew real happiness until you.

With that kiss, I tried to tell him the enormity of what he meant to me. I tried to show him that he was the answer to a question I hadn't even known I had been asking. I tried to thank him for wanting me to be me, more than he wanted to make me stay.

I frowned at the list. "So… I'll go back and tell the Traynors that I'm going to get their suicidal quadriplegic son drunk, spend their money on strippers and lap dancers, and then trundle him off to the Disability Olympics—

Heartbreak was a luxury too costly for the single parent.

you can hang on to your hurt out of some misplaced sense of pride, or you can just let go and relish whatever precious time you have.

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. Some deep-rooted part of you would know you were loved. That you deserved to be loved.

I could hear her babbling away beside me, but I wasn't really paying attention. I could barely focus on anything. My nerve endings seemed to have come alive; they almost jangled with anticipation I was going to see Will. Whatever else, I had that. I could almost feel the miles between us shrinking, as if we were at two ends of some invisible elastic thread.

If someone wanted to be with you, after all, they just made it happen.

I was good at keeping secrets from my parents (it's one of the things we learn while growing up, after all).

First I put on what I thought of as my 'artistic' outfit, a green smock dress with huge amber beads stitched into it. I imagined the kind of people who went to concerts might be quite arty and flamboyant. Will and Nathan both stared at me as I entered the living room. 'No,' said Will, flatly. 'That looks like something my mum would wear,' said Nathan. 'You never told me your mum was Nana Mouskouri,' Will said.

They began to tune up, and suddenly the auditorium was filled with a single sound - the most alive, three-dimensional thing I had ever heard. It made the hairs on my skin stand up, my breath catch in my throat....I felt the music like a physical thing; it didn't just sit in my ears, it flowed through me, around me, made my senses vibrate. It made my skin prickle and my palms dampen...It was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard.

She was always tired, these days. She put on one of those smiles that wasn't really a smile at all, and they went on.

My voice, when it emerged, cracked a little. "I'm not in love with a ghost.

How could I convey the way those short months had changed the way I felt about everything? The way he had skewed my world so totally that is made no sense without him

What are you saying?" He fought to keep his voice under control. "You love me but there's no hope for us?

I ask you not to judge me for my weakness. The only way I can endure is to be in a place where I will never see you, never be haunted by the possibility of seeing you with him. I need to be somewhere where sheer necessity forces you from my thoughts minute by minute, hour by hour, I cannot do that here.

This is what people don't see, wrapped up in their cities, with the noise and the smoke, and their tiny boxes for houses. Up there you can breathe. You can't hear the town talking and talking. No eyes on you, 'cept God's. It's just you and the trees and the birds and the river and the sky and freedom . . . Out there, it's good for the soul.

You know, you can only actually help someone who wants to be helped.