Very few troubles in life couldn’t be lessened by a nice smile – that was what her mother always said.
I could only have done the thing that I did, but also that this will help you live a really good life, a better life, than if you hadn’t met me.
That’s the thing you don’t know about children unless you have them – bath time, Lego, and fish fingers don’t allow you to dwell on tragedy for too long.
A certain kind of man looked at God’s own land, she thought, as she drew closer, and instead of beauty and wonder, all he saw was dollar signs.
But if we don’t have faith that he can feel better, even get better, then how is he supposed to keep the faith that good things might happen?” Nathan.
I never really cared what anyone thought of me until he came along, ” she said. “And now, I can’t believe it’s me he’s chosen. Every morning I wake up and thank God that he did. Every night I go to bed praying that time will go that much faster so that I can be with him again. I think all the time about what he’s doing, who he’s talking to. Not in a jealous way, or anything. I just want to be closer to him, and if I can imagine what he’s doing, then that helps.
I realized pretty quickly I couldn’t marry a man without a bookshelf.
Who says you failed?” Dad stroked her hair back from her face. His expression was tender. “I’m just thinking of what I know about Will Traynor, what I know about men like him. And I’ll say one thing to you. I’m not sure anyone in the world was ever going to persuade that man once he’d set his mind to something. He’s who he is. You can’t make people change who they are.
It was not, they observed with exquisite understatement, a cry for help.
And when it came down to it, what was the point in re-examining your sadness all the time anyway? It was like picking at a wound and refusing to let it heal. I knew what I had been part of. I knew what my role was. What was the point in going over and over it?
There’s only one response, and I can tell you this because I see it every day. You LIVE. And you throw yourself into everything and try not to think about the bruises.
Stolen from someone. Like they stole everything. Occupied. I was occupied. I disappeared.
Dean Martin growled at me, as if in agreement. I was going to say something else but trying to work out which of his eyes was actually looking at me was weirdly distracting.
Your face when you came back from diving that time told me everything; there is a hunger in you, Clark. A fearlessness. You just buried it, like most people do.
I liked the fact that I could be who I wanted to be without my sister’s voice reminding me of who I had been.
There seems to be something miraculous about seeing the relentless optimism of new growth after the bleakness of winter, a kind of joy in the difference every year, the way nature chooses to show off different parts of the garden to its full advantage.
Please. Come on. Right here, on the bed. Right next to me.
It is the death of hope that comes as the greatest relief.
He had this way of talking where you could never quite be sure that he wasn’t mocking you.
Somehow it was harder to show all that emotional stuff to someone you knew.