Helen Freeman > Helen Freeman's Quotes

“I swallowed. “Mum, you’re not going to get divorced, are you?” Her eyes shot open. “Divorced? I’m a good Catholic girl, Louisa. We don’t divorce. We just make our men suffer for all eternity.” She waited just for a moment, and then she started to laugh.”
― Jojo Moyes, After You

“I want to tell him that I don't know what i feel. I want him but i'm frightened to want him. I don;t want my happiness to be entirely dependent on somebody else's to be a hostage to fortunes I cannot control.”
― Jojo Moyes, After You

“I’m still a doughnut, okay?” I said. “I want to be a bun. I really do. But I’m still a doughnut.”
― Jojo Moyes, After You

“Hey, Lou!” she yelled. “I meant to say to you. Moving on doesn’t mean you loved my dad any less, you know. I’m pretty sure even he would tell you that.”
― Jojo Moyes, After You

“none of us move on without a backward look. We move on always carrying with us those we have lost. What we aim to do in our little group is ensure that carrying them is not a burden, something that feels impossible to bear, a weight keeping us stuck in the same place. We want their presence to feel like a gift.”
― Jojo Moyes, After 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.”
― Jojo Moyes, After You

“No. Really. I’ve thought about it a lot. You learn to live with it, with them. Because they do stay with you, even if they’re not living, breathing people anymore. 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

“Sometimes just getting through each day requires almost superhuman strength.”
― Jojo Moyes, After You

“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”
― Jojo Moyes, After You

“I think people get bored of grief,” said Natasha. “It’s like you’re allowed some unspoken allotted time—six months maybe—and then they get faintly irritated that you’re not ‘better,’ like you’re being self-indulgent hanging on to your unhappiness.”
― Jojo Moyes, After You

“No journey out of grief was straightforward. There would be good days and bad days.”
― Jojo Moyes, After You

“Losing him was like having a hole shot straight through me, a painful, constant reminder, an absence I could never fill.”
― Jojo Moyes, After You

“You never know what will happen when you fall from a great height.”
― Jojo Moyes, After You

“It is important not to turn the dead into saints. Nobody can walk in the shadow of a saint.”
― Jojo Moyes, After 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

“The only way to avoid being left behind was to start moving.”
― Jojo Moyes, After You

“I loved a man who had opened up a world to me but hadn’t loved me enough to stay in it.”
― Jojo Moyes, After You

“You don't have to let that one thing be the thing that defines you.”
― Jojo Moyes, After You

“You really didn't see the sadness or the longing unless you already knew it was there. But that was the trick, wasn't it? Everyone had their disappointment and their baggage; only, some people carried it in their inside pockets and not on their backs.”
― Maggie Stiefvater, The Dream Thieves

“Everyone has baggage, maybe we should help each other carry it.”
― Rob Liano

“And she loved Mattie. Living with her in simple friendship might be akin to dancing the Charleston when what you really ached for was a slow waltz -- but the music still played; it was, in its way, still a dance.”
― Lissa Evans, Old Baggage

“if you have enough money it doesn’t matter who’s Prime Minister”
― Lissa Evans, Old Baggage