I should have listened to my father. “Want to know the true definition of the triumph of hope over experience?” he would say. “Plan a fun family day out.
I wondered if she knew that everything she said made the other person feel like an idiot. I wondered if it was something she’d actually cultivated deliberately. I didn’t think I could ever manage to make someone feel inferior.
What are you saying?” He fought to keep his voice under control. “You love me but there’s no hope for us?
I wanted to live as Edouard did, joyfully, sucking the marrow out of every moment and singing because it tasted so good.
I’m not very romantic in real life. I guess love is the thing that makes us do the most extraordinary things – the emotion that can bring us highest or lowest, or be the most transformative – and extremes of emotion are always interesting to write about.
Heartbreak was a luxury too costly for the single parent.
I was twenty-six years old and I wasn’t really sure about what I was. You probably wouldn’t look at me twice. An ordinary girl, leading an ordinary life. It actually suited me fine.
Best before: 19 March 2007.
She looked a bit like a different person. It was weird. Just a few weeks away from home could rub the familiarity right off of someone.
Don’t let that thing define you” -Will Traynor.
And because, most crazy of all, all that kindness, all that magnificence, was sitting there just because of his words.
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.
It could be oddly dispiriting, the blank refusal of humankind to even attempt to function responsibly.
I never knew real happiness until you.
I often think that the ability to earn a living by doing the thing one loves must be one of life’s greatest gifts.
Who was it who had said you were only as happy as your unhappiest child?
Solo se vive una vez. En realidad, es tu deber que sea una vida plena.
I like the breath of foreign air, the close-up glimpses of lives far removed from my own. I liked to hear the accents and work out where their owners came from, to study the clothes of people who have never seen a Next catalog or bought a five-pack of knickers at Marks and Spencer.
If I don’t cry while writing a key emotional scene, my gut feeling is it’s failed.
But just as nature abhors a vacuum – so does the human heart.