Jojo Moyes · 390 pages
Rating: (57.4K votes)
“Know that you hold my heart, my hopes, in your hands.”
“I was once told by someone wise that writing is perilous as you cannot always guarantee your words will be read in the spirit in which they were written.”
“Somewhere in this world is a man who loves you, who understands how precious and clever and kind you are. A man who has always loved you and, to his detriment, suspects he always will.”
“If all we are allowed is hours, minutes, I want to be able to etch each of them on to my memory with exquisite clarity so that I can recall them at moments like this, when my very soul feels blackened.”
“It was indeed a gift to have someone to love.”
“She regards Ellie gravely. "You know, you can't make someone love you again. No matter how much you might want it. Sometimes, unfortunately, the timing is simply...off.”
“Take him to you, if you must, my love, but don’t love him. Please don’t love him.”
“To have someone out there who understands you, who desires you, who sees you as a better version of yourself, is the most astonishing gift.”
“That evening she glowed. She gave off a vibration of energy that he suspected only he could detect. Do I do this to you?, he wondered, as he watched her eat. Or is this just the relief of being out from under the forbidden eye of that husband of yours?”
“But just as nature abhors a vacuum -- so does the human heart.”
“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.”
“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.”
“...there was another way to live. A way that did not involve anesthetizing yourself. A way that did not mean you lived your whole life as an apology for who you were.”
“But don't blame me for the food. My wife knows a hundred and one ways to incinerate a cow, and as far as I can tell she's still experimenting.”
“Anthony," she had said, and with that one word,had given him not only herself but a new, better edited version of his future.”
“There's no such thing as a life free of complications, Rory. We all end up making compromises in the end.”
“Ich habe vor langer Zeit gelernt, dass "was wäre, wenn…" ein gefährliches Spiel ist.”
“If you were mine," Anthony said, "I wouldn't leave you alone for a minute."
"I bet you say that to all the girls."
"Don't," he said. "I hate that."
"Oh you can't pretend you haven't used all your best lines on other women first. I know you, Boot. You told me, remember?”
“He will be out there, living his life to the full, when she seems to have put hers perennially on hold.”
“She’d read somewhere that you only truly saw what someone looked like in the first few minutes of meeting them, that after then it was only an impression, colored by what you thought of them.”
“When you looked at me with those limitless, deliquescent eyes of yours, I used to wonder what it was you could possibly see in me. Now I know that is a foolish view of love. You and I could no more not love each other than the earth could stop circling the sun.”
“gravely. “You know, you can’t make someone love you again. No matter how much you might want it. Sometimes, unfortunately, the timing is simply . . . off.”
“She didn't talk about it: if this past year has taught her one thing, it is to live in the present. She immersed herself in every moment, refusing to cloud it by considering the cost. The fall would come - it always did - but she usually collected enough memories to cushion it a little.”
“You know I’m married,’ he said. ‘You read my cuttings.’ I’ve googled every last reference to you, she told him silently. ‘I’ve never been . . . unfaithful before. I still can’t quite articulate what happened.’ ‘I blame the quiche,’ she quipped, wincing. ‘You do something to me, Ellie Haworth. I haven’t written a word in forty-eight hours.’ He paused. ‘You make me forget what I want to say.’ Then I’m doomed, she thought, because as soon as she had felt his weight against her, his mouth on hers, she had known – despite everything she had ever said to her friends about married men, everything she had ever believed – that she required only the faintest acknowledgement from him of what had happened for her to be lost. A year on, she still hadn’t begun to look for a way out.”
“Believe me, you have to have a certain confidence in your powers of descretion to let a dentist loose with a drill in your mouth less than an hour after you've...um...entertained his wife.”
“I'd like to hope you end up a miserable, lonely woman. But actually, I hope you have children one day, Ellie Haworth. Then you'll know how it feels to be vulnerable. And to have to fight, to be constantly vigilant, just to make sure your children get to grow up with a father.”
“Ellie's head sinks into her hands, and she weeps for the unknown Boot, for Jennifer, for chances missed and a life wasted. She cries for herself, because nobody will ever love her like he loved Jennifer, and because she suspects that she is spoiling what might have been a perfectly good, if ordinary, life. She cries because she is drunk and in her flat and there are few advantages to living on your own except being able to sob uninhibitedly at will.”
“She didn’t want to end up like some girls from her school, exhausted and pushing prams in their mid-twenties, financially dependent on husbands they seemed to despise.”
“He talked to her in the way that people tell lifelong secrets to fellow passengers in railway carriages.”
“Costui, [...] un giorno osò rivolgerle il discorso. La sventurata rispose.”
“The scar will remain, but it is better for a man to lose both arms than his soul; and these hard years, instead of being lost, may be made the most precious of your lives, if they teach you to rule yourselves.”
“My little girl, oh, the daughter I never had. Now tell me, angel, are you fucking anybody new?”
“Les trois femmes, saisies de pitié, pleuraient: les larmes sont aussi contagieuses que peut l'être le rire.”
“You're important," Nicholas interrupted quietly catching her face and turning her to peer at him. "You're the most important thing in the world to me Jo. I love you. Let me have this moment.”
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