Amy > Amy's Quotes

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons

“There are a few times in life when you leap up and the past that you'd been standing on falls away behind you, and the future you mean to land on is not yet in place, and for a moment you're suspended knowing nothing and no one, not even yourself.”
― Ann Patchett, The Dutch House

“Wars lay easier upon the conscience, Lydia decided, when you could not see the faces of the people you were fighting. And it was vastly easier to hate a man when you’d not learned his Christian name, or pried into his private thoughts and learned that he was human.”
― Susanna Kearsley, Bellewether

“Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“I see the past as it actually was," Maeve said. She was looking at the trees.

"But we overlay the present onto the past. We look back through the lens of what we know now, so we're not seeing it as the people we were, we're seeing it as the people we are, and that means the past has been radically altered.”
― Ann Patchett, The Dutch House

“One person cannot own another, darling, for our souls belong to us and God and no one else.”
― Susanna Kearsley, Bellewether

“You love her."
Jean-Philippe did not- would not- deny it.
Pierre sighed. "You're like the sheep, Marine, so stupid. Always you look back at where you've come from, what you've been, what you believe you are, and so you do not see the path you should be taking."
"I'm a soldier. I don't get to choose my path." He'd meant for that to stop the argument.
It didn't. "You're a soldier, so you follow, yes? Then follow this." Pierre's hard finger jabbed him in the chest, above his heart. "God gave you this. He set it like a light within you, so that you could see it well and know the way to go. You follow this, Marine. Don't look behind.”
― Susanna Kearsley, Bellewether

“My grandmother,” he told me, “had a theory about doors. Whenever things were going wrong, she’d have my stepdad come hang a new door for her. He’d tell her she was nuts, that doors were doors, but she’d say no door ever opened exactly the same as the last one, the new one was always that little bit different, and anyway it never did any harm to walk through a new door now and then, and see where you end up.”
― Susanna Kearsley, Bellewether

“Joseph doesn’t see a wall,” their mother used to say, “only the ways to get around it.”
― Susanna Kearsley, Bellewether

“He had been a child when he had last made cider. He’d forgotten the sharp rush of smells, the sweetness and the almost-rotten richness and the way it lingered everywhere. He had forgotten, too, the way the cider tasted freshly pressed, before it had fermented. Before time had changed its purity to something stronger. Harder.”
― Susanna Kearsley, Bellewether

“The future is mysterious and frightening to you now, but in the end all will be well. There will be great happiness and great sorrow, you will have a family, you will find yourself capable of things you cannot now imagine. But you will persevere, and one day you will look around yourself and know that your life is good and that you are, in spite of all your early fears, happy.”
― Sara Donati

“There was nothing predictable in this life, and very little that was fair.”
― Sara Donati, The Gilded Hour

“Give children a clock to live by,” Mrs. Lee said. “So they know what’s coming, when it’s coming, how long it will last. They’ll take comfort in that knowing.”
― Sara Donati, The Gilded Hour

“When will you stop thinking of yourself as a burden?”
― Sara Donati, The Gilded Hour

“Young people today (finally, I’m old enough to use that cliché) seem to have no real conception of how bad things were for women and, more important, could be again.”
― Sara Donati, The Gilded Hour

“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, Me Before You

“I will never, ever regret the things I've done. Because most days, all you have are places in your memory that you can go to.”
― Jojo Moyes, Me Before You

“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. 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.”
― Jojo Moyes, Me Before You

“Shhh. Just listen. You, of all people. Listen to what Im saying. This...tonight...is the most wonderful thing you could have done for me. What you have told me, what you have done in bringing me here...knowing that, somehow, from that complete arse, I was at the start of this, you managed to salvage something to love is astonishing to me. But...I need it to end here. No more chair. No more pneumonia. No more burning limbs. No more pain and tiredness and waking up every morning already wishing it was over. When we get back, I am still going to go to Switzerland. And if you do love me, Clark, as you say you do, the thing that would make me happier than anything is if you would come with me. So I'm asking you - if you feel the things you say you feel - then do it. Be with me. Give me the end I'm hoping for.”
― Jojo Moyes, Me Before You

“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, After You

“There is always a way out of a situation. Might be ugly. Might leave you feeling like the earth had gone and shifted under your feet. But there is always a way around.”
― Jojo Moyes, The Giver of Stars

“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.”
― Jojo Moyes, The Last Letter from Your Lover

“I thought about how you’re shaped so much by the people who surround you, and how careful you have to be in choosing them for this exact reason, and then I thought, despite all that, in the end maybe you have to lose them all in order to truly find yourself.”
― Jojo Moyes, Still Me

“You’re going to feel uncomfortable in your new world for a bit. It always does feel strange to be knocked out of your comfort zone . . . There is a hunger in you, Clark. A fearlessness. You just buried it, like most people do. Just live well. Just live.”
― Jojo Moyes, After You

“She just wasn’t sure she had yet been to the place she was homesick for.”
― Jojo Moyes, The Giver of Stars

“I had a choice. I was Louisa Clark from New York or Louisa Clark from Stortfold. Or there might be a whole other Louisa I hadn’t yet met. The key was making sure that anyone you allowed to walk beside you didn’t get to decide which you were, and pin you down like a butterfly in a case. The key was to know that you could always somehow find a way to reinvent yourself again.”
― Jojo Moyes, Still Me

“That some things are a gift, even if you don't get to keep them.”
― Jojo Moyes, The Giver of Stars

“I worked it out sitting here. Maybe that’s the thing we need to understand, Alice. That some things are a gift, even if you don’t get to keep them.”
There was a silence before he spoke again.
“Maybe just to know that something this beautiful exists is all we can really ask for.”
― Jojo Moyes, The Giver of Stars

“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

“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.”
― Jojo Moyes