J.P. Delaney > Quotes

“One of the strange things about grief is the way it ambushes you when you least expect it.”
― J.P. Delaney, The Girl Before

“Sometimes, when you wear a mask too long, you find it sticks to the skin.”
― J.P. Delaney, Believe Me

“Never apologise for someone you love, he says quietly. It makes you look like a prick.”
― J.P. Delaney, The Girl Before

“Please make a list of every possession you consider essential to your life.

I take a deep breath and pick up my pen.”
― J.P. Delaney, The Girl Before

“Never apologize for someone you love, he says quietly. It makes you look like a prick.”
― J.P. Delaney

“Because if a woman can't trust the man who said he'd love her forever, who in this world can you trust?”
― J.P. Delaney, Believe Me

“Sometimes it's as if I can shrink away to nothing. Sometimes I feel as pure and perfect as a ghost. The hunger, the headaches, the dizziness—these are the only things that are real.”
― J.P. Delaney, The Girl Before

“But one day, when Toby is old enough, I will take down a shoe box from a shelf where it is kept, and I will tell him again the story of his sister, Isabel Margaret Cavendish, the girl who came before.”
― J.P. Delaney, The Girl Before

“But I know he loves me. I know he needs our games, that they answer some deep-seated hunger in him.”
― J.P. Delaney, The Girl Before

“I have no time for people who don’t strive to better themselves.”
― J.P. Delaney, The Girl Before

“Like parents who split up in the aftermath of a child’s death, because the grief would only be survivable with someone who didn’t feel the same pain as you, whose agony didn’t reflect yours every time you looked into their eyes.”
― J.P. Delaney, Playing Nice

“People like to talk about clean slates. But the only truly clean slate is a new one. The rest are gray from whatever’s been written on them before.”
― J.P. Delaney, The Girl Before

“There was a mountain of grief to be climbed, and no amount of talk would help me up it.”
― J.P. Delaney, The Girl Before

“I feel a thrill of excitement at this first tiny glimpse of self-revelation, of intimacy.”
― J.P. Delaney, The Girl Before

“We already have eight hundred million people living in hunger—and population is growing by eighty million a year. Over a billion people are in poverty—and present industrial strategies are making them poorer, not richer. The percentage of old people will double by 2050—and already there aren’t enough young people to care for them. Cancer rates are projected to increase by seventy percent in the next fifteen years. Within two decades our oceans will contain more microplastics than fish. Fossil fuels will run out before the end of the century. Do you have an answer to those problems? Because I do. Robot farmers will increase food production twentyfold. Robot carers will give our seniors a dignified old age. Robot divers will clear up the mess humans have made of our seas. And so on, and so on—but every single step has to be costed and paid for by the profits of the last.” He paused for breath, then went on, “My vision is a society where autonomous, intelligent bots are as commonplace as computers are now. Think about that—how different our world could be. A world where disease, hunger, manufacturing, design, are all taken care of by AI. That’s the revolution we’re shooting for. The shopbots get us to the next level, that’s all. And you know what? This is not some binary choice between idealism or realism, because for some of us idealism is just long-range realism. This shit has to happen. And you need to ask yourself, do you want to be part of that change? Or do you want to stand on the sidelines and bitch about the details?” We had all heard this speech, or some version of it, either in our job interviews, or at company events, or in passionate late-night tirades. And on every single one of us it had had a deep and transformative effect. Most of us had come to Silicon Valley back in those heady days when it seemed a new generation finally had the tools and the intelligence to change the world. The hippies had tried and failed; the yuppies and bankers had had their turn. Now it was down to us techies. We were fired up, we were zealous, we felt the nobility of our calling…only to discover that the general public, and our backers along with them, were more interested in 140 characters, fitness trackers, and Grumpy Cat videos. The greatest, most powerful deep-learning computers in humanity’s existence were inside Google and Facebook—and all humanity had to show for it were adwords, sponsored links, and teenagers hooked on sending one another pictures of their genitals.”
― J.P. Delaney, The Perfect Wife

“That was Emma—she'd have enjoyed knowing she had something like that, something that could blow her whole fucking life and mine apart if it came out. Her little bit of power.”
― J.P. Delaney, The Girl Before

“Grief, I discovered, feels not so very different from defeat.”
― J.P. Delaney, The Girl Before

“And when I realized you had secrets too, I was glad. I thought we could be honest with each other. That we could finally rid ourselves of all the clutter from our past. Not our possessions, but the stuff we carry around inside our heads. Because that's what I've realized, living in One Folgate Street. You can make your surroundings as polished and empty as you like. But it doesn't really matter if you're still messed up inside. And that's all anyone's looking for really, isn't it? Someone to take care of the mess inside our heads?”
― J.P. Delaney, The Girl Before

“How do we ever trust each other again, when we both know how good we are at lying?”
― J.P. Delaney, Believe Me

“We're all connected now, I think as I send it off into cyberspace. Everyone and everything.”
― J.P. Delaney, The Girl Before

“You are a crazy, evil woman,” Patrick says, staring at me.

“You don’t know how crazy,” I promise him. “You haven’t seen anything yet.”
― J.P. Delaney, Believe Me

“She’s insecure, impulsive, fragile, emotionally incontinent, can’t handle rejection, and although she tries extremely hard to hide it, she craves approval like a junkie craving a fix. What can I say, Frank? She’s an actress.”
― J.P. Delaney, Believe Me

“I don't want anything from you, Edward. If you'd only told me you were still in love with Emma—'

'You don't understand,' he interrupts. 'It was like an illness. I hated myself every second I was with her.”
― J.P. Delaney, The Girl Before

“I realize something. I haven't had a single flashback or panic attack since I stepped inside the house. It's so cut off from the outside world, so cocooned, I feel utterly safe. A line from my favorite movie floats into my head. The quietness and the proud look of it. Nothing very bad could happen to you there.”
― J.P. Delaney, The Girl Before

“Oh, hasn't he told you? The ones before. None of them last, you see. That's the whole point.”
― J.P. Delaney, The Girl Before

“Who is the real Claire Wright? The one sitting here, with her precious green card permit in front of her, exchanging pleasantries with the man who provided it? Or the one who fell for the darkness she sensed deep inside the only man she couldn’t seduce? Which is the performance: Who I was then? Or who I am now?”
― J.P. Delaney, Believe Me

“I'll tell you something that was unusual, though. When most people are caught lying to the police, they cave in pretty quickly. Emma's response was to tell another lie. It might have been planted in her head by her brief, but even so that's not a common reaction.”
― J.P. Delaney, The Girl Before

“But there’s mounting evidence that many successful CEOs and politicians are actually psychopaths, too; or at least, fall somewhere on the psychopathic spectrum—that is, they score low on tests for remorse, conscience, and moral judgment, and high for fearlessness, quick thinking, and cold-bloodedness. And there are certain psychopathic traits that we know Miles has. Something called shallow affect, for example—having a very limited range of emotions. Getting bored easily. Impulsiveness. Charm. Not really caring about other people’s feelings, except as a tool to manipulate them by. Having very few long-term friends. Seeing life as a contest where, for you to win, others have to lose. And treating your children as trophies, flattering extensions of yourself.”
― J.P. Delaney, Playing Nice

“If I’d been asked to make a list of what I could do without, I’d never have managed it. But by putting the thought in my head that really none of it’s important, I find myself wondering if I can’t just shed all my things, my stuff, like an old skin. Maybe”
― J.P. Delaney, The Girl Before

“Perhaps the real test of someone’s humanity, you think, is how tenderly they treat those like Danny. Whether they blindly try to fix them and make them more like everyone else, or whether they can accept their differentness and adapt the world to it.”
― J.P. Delaney, The Perfect Wife