Across Manhattan the sun glowed orange, the endless sea of glittering skyscrapers reflecting back a peach light, the centre of the world, going about its business. A million lives below me, a million heartbreaks big and small, tales of joy and loss and survival, a million little victories every day.
I kissed him and let my lips rest against his so that our breath mingled and the tears from my eyes became salt on his skin, and I told myself that, somewhere, tiny particles of him would become tiny particles of me, ingested, swallowed, alive, perpetual.
I needed to give my son something to look at. I needed to tell him, silently, that things might change, grow, or fail, but that life did go on. That we were all part of some great cycle, some pattern that it was only God's purpose to understand.
You are pretty much the only thing that wants me to walk up in the morning.
I just…want to be a man who has been to a concert with a girl in a red dress. Just for a few minutes more.
You should just keep your mouth shout! It gets very tedious having you make a snarky comment about everything that someone says in this group.
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.
I liked the way he turned his face and looked at me with amusement, like I had somehow turned it to be so much more than he had expected.
I thought, briefly, that I would never feel as intensely connected to the world, to another human being, as I did at that moment.
You shut down a library Louisa, you don't just shut down a building, you shut down hope.
I thought about the fact that there seemed to be such a high cost to anything a woman chose to do with her life, unless she simply aimed low. But I knew that already, didn't I? I had come here and it had cost me dear.
Sometimes I felt as if we were all wading around in grief, reluctant to admit to others how far we were waving or drowning.
I had been wrong when I said Liza McCullen wasn't beautiful: when she smiled she was stunning.
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.
Marty used to tell her she had the world's worst poker face: her feelings floated across her features like reflections on a still pond.
Even if you do not feel it now, there is pleasure to be had from being a decent person.
It is not the grown man- the galumphing, unshaven, stinking, opinionated offspring- 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.
Even thinking about heading up there again made my heart thump harder; it took nothing for me to recall that sense of the world disappearing from beneath me, like a rug pulled from under my feet.
Sometimes I look at the lives of the people around me and I wonder if we aren't all destined to leave a trail of damage.
And I have huge admiration for you picking yourself up and moving on. Sometimes just getting through each day requires almost superhuman strength.
Push yourself. Don't settle. Wear those stripy legs with pride. And if you insist on settling down with some ridiculous bloke, make sure some of this is squirreled away somewhere. Knowing you still have possibilities is a luxury. Knowing I might have given them to you has alleviated something for me.
You never know what will happen when you fall from a great height.
And there it was. He knew it, and I knew it. There was nothing left for me to do. Do you know how hard it is to say nothing ? When every atom of you strains to do the opposite? I just tried to be, tried to absorb the man I loved through osmosis, tried to imprint what I had left of him on myself. I did not speak...
We had not mentioned love, but my every nerve ending throbbed with it, and I carried it in a cloud around me, like sea mist.
Oh, Louisa, you can hang on to your hurt out of some misplaced sense of pride, or you can just let go and relish whatever precious time you have.
If chick-lit really is taking a commercial battering, I'd suggest it's because the marketing has been done to death. Covering everything in girlie pink and putting chocolate in the title may once have been a clever Pavlovian device but now makes readers feel a bit sick.
My sister actually has a "thinking face." It makes people wait before speaking to her. Dad says my thinking face makes it look like I want to go to the loo.
He had the ability to twist almost anything I said or did so that I seemed stupid. During.
She couldn't believe losing someone you had known such a short time could feel like losing part of yourself, that it could make food taste wrong and colors seem dull.
We seem to live in an age where we are quietly appalled by the idea of appetites, whether they be for sex, food or diamonds.
And because, most crazy of all, all that kindness, all that magnificence, was sitting there just because of his words.
Loved reading Me Before You and The Girl You Left Behind. Both stories kept me very involved with sometimes twists and turns that I did not expect!
She had seeped into his consciousness so thoroughly, absorbing all lucid thought, that not only could he think of nothing else but no longer cared to.
You and I. We are both immigrants. We both know it is hard to find your place in this world. You want to make your life better, work hard in country that is not your own - you make new life, new friends, find new love. You get to become new person! But is never a simple thing, never without cost.
I try to read writers who are better than me because it inspires me to be better.
I had mistaken feeling for feeling unhappy.
I stared at my calendar, the pen stilled in my hand. This little patch of paper suddenly bore a whole heap of responsibility. I had a hundred and seventeen days in which to convince Will Traynor that he had a reason to live.
Convinced that if she wished hard enough, good things would finally happen.
Everyone I've ever met who was worth knowing was a bit different at school.
I felt a little better. I did. I reminded myself of something else Marc had said: that no journey out of grief was straightforward. There would be good days and bad days. Today was just a bad day, a kink in the road to be traversed and survived.
I looked at Will and I saw the baby I held in my arms, dewily besotted, unable to believe that I had created another human being. I saw 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.
I'm not letting go of you.
She was beautiful. As always she looked like she'd meant to head for somewhere else but at the last minute she'd decided to stop by you, as a favor, you understand.
I'm telling you there's a while world out there.
Remember, good things happen.
What love is depends on where you are in relation to it. Secure in it, it can feel as mundane and necessary as air - you exist within it, almost unnoticing. Deprived of it, it can feel like an obsession; all consuming - a physical pain.
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.
In 'Me Before You,' the two characters popped into my head fully formed, which is really strange and unusual. Other books, I sit on them for two or three months. I have a whole routine: I buy a nice book; I hand-write all their characteristics. I put them through little tests just to see how they would react to things.
He talked to her in the way that people tell lifelong secrets to fellow passengers in railway carriages: an unburdened intimacy, resting on the unspoken understanding that they were unlikely to meet again.
