The collection / 89 fragments

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Passages, proverbs, and questions carried across the ages.

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01Undated

I had a hundred and seventeen days in which to convince Will Traynor that he had a reason to live.

Jojo Moyes / quote

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02Undated

He dropped his head and kissed her. He kissed her and it was a kiss of utter certainty, the kind of kiss during which monarchs die and whole continents fall without your even noticing. When Jess extricated herself, it was only because she didn't want the children to see her lose the ability to stand.

Jojo Moyes / quote

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03Undated

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

Jojo Moyes / quote

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04Undated

I realized I was afraid of living without him. How is it you have the right to destroy my life, I wanted to demand of him, but I’m not allowed a say in yours?-Lou

Jojo Moyes / quote

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05Undated

A face whose emotions had not yet been battered by experience.

Jojo Moyes / quote

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06Undated

You still don’t get it, Clark, do you?’ I couldhear the smile in his voice. ‘It’s not your choice.

Jojo Moyes / quote

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07Undated

Hannah ran past, beaming. I remember that feeling--when you're a kid and it's your birthday and for one day everyone makes you feel like the most special person in the world.

Jojo Moyes / quote

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08Undated

I know this isn’t a conventional love story. I know there are all sorts of reasons I shouldn’t even be saying what I am. But I love you. I do. I knew it when I left Patrick. And I think you might even love me a little bit.

Jojo Moyes / quote

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09Undated

I know we can do this. I know it’s nothow you would have chosen it, but I know I can make you happy. And all I can say is that you make me … you make me into someone I couldn’t even imagine. You make me happy,even when you’re awful. I would rather be with you – even the you that you seem to think is diminished – than with anyone else in the world.

Jojo Moyes / quote

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10Undated

He dropped his head and kissed her. He kisses her and it was a kiss of utter certainty, the kind of kiss during which monarchs die and whole continents fall without your even noticing.

Jojo Moyes / quote

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11Undated

Its 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, to my hospital appointments, to the restrictions on my life. I don't want you to miss out on the things someone else could give you.

Jojo Moyes / quote

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12Undated

Some mistakes... Just have greater consequences than others. But you don't have to let the result of one mistake be the thing that defines you. You, Clark, have the choice not to let that happen.

Jojo Moyes / quote

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13Undated

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.

Jojo Moyes / quote

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14Undated

I hadn't thought that as well as the obvious fears about money, and your future, losing your job would make you feel inadequate, and a bit useless. That it would be harder to get up in the morning then when you were rudely shocked into consciousness by the alarm. That you might miss the people you worked with, no matter how little you had in common with them. Or even that you might find yourself searching for familiar faces as you walked the high street.

Jojo Moyes / quote

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15Undated

You learn to live with it, with them. Because they do stay with you, even if they’re not living, breathing people any more.It’s not the same crushing grief you felt at first, the kind that swamps you, and makes you want to cry in the wrong places, and get irrationally angry with all the idiots who are still alive when the person you love is dead.It’s just something you learn to accommodate.Like adapting around a hole. I don’t know. It’s like you become … a doughnut instead of a bun

Jojo Moyes / quote

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16Undated

How could I explain to this girl what Will and I had been to each other,the way I felt that no person in the world had ever understood me like he did or ever would again?How could she understand that losing him was like having a hole shot straight through me, a painful, constant reminder, an absence I could never fill?

Jojo Moyes / quote

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17Undated

It's just that the thing you never understand about being a mother, until you are one, is that it is not the grown man - the galumphing, unshaven, stinking, opinionated off-spring - you see before you, with his parking tickets and unpolished shoes and complicated love life. You see all the people he has ever been all rolled up into one.I look at him and see the baby I held in my arms, dewing besotted, unable to believe that I'd created another human being. I see 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.

Jojo Moyes / quote

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18Undated

Some mistakes... just have greater consequences than others. But you don't have to let that night be the thing that defines you.

Jojo Moyes / quote

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19Undated

I thought the world had actually ended. I thought nothing good could ever happen again. I thought anything might happen if I wasn't vigilant. I didn't eat. I didn't go out. I didn't want to see anyone. But I survived, Paul. Much to my own surprise, I got through it. And life...well, gradually became livable again.

Jojo Moyes / quote

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20Undated

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. And I told him of the adventures they had, the places they had gone, and the things I had seen that I had never expected to. I conjured for him electric skies and iridescent seas and evenings full of laughter and silly jokes. I drew a world for him, a world far from a Swiss industrial estate, a world in which he was still somehow the person he had wanted to be. I drew the world he had created for me, full of wonder and possibility. I let him know a hurt had been mended in a way that he couldn’t have known, and for that alone there would always be a piece of me indebted to him. And as I spoke I knew these would be the most important words I would ever say and that it was important that they were the right words, that they were not propaganda, an attempt to change his mind, but respectful of what Will had said. I told him something good...

Jojo Moyes / quote

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21Undated

And it was suddenly very simple: There was no choice.

Jojo Moyes / quote

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22Undated

You don't have to let that one thing be the thing that defines you.

Jojo Moyes / quote

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23Undated

It is important not to turn the dead into saints. Nobody can walk in the shadow of a saint.

Jojo Moyes / quote

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24Undated

But I knew very well how the persona you chose to present to the world could be very different from what was inside.I knew how grief could make you behave in ways you couldn’t even begin to understand.

Jojo Moyes / quote

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