If I don’t cry while writing a key emotional scene, my gut feeling is it’s failed.
Cheap as chips, cheap as chips, it’s a British expression. There’s no couture in their darling.
I was once told by someone wise that writing is perilous as you cannot always guarantee your words will be read in the spirit in which they were written.
There are normal hours, and then there are invalid hours, where time stalls and slips, where life – real life – seems to exist at one remove.
Only you, Will Traynor, could tell a woman how to wear a bloody dress.
Astonishingly, not all girls get dressed just to please men.
I chose to believe that God, a benign God, would understand our sufferings and forgive us our trespasses.
Nobody fights you like your own sister; nobody else knows the most vulnerable parts of you and will aim for them without mercy.
You know, you spend your whole life feeling like you don’t quite fit in anywhere. And then you walk into a room one day, whether it’s at university or an office or some kind of club, and you just go, ‘Ah. There they are.’ And suddenly you feel at home.
She went kind of pink and laughed, the kind of laugh you do when you know yo shouldn’t be laughing. The kind of laugh that spoke of a conspiracy.
Sometimes when you get hammered till the small hours you feel pretty good in the morning, but really it’s just because you’re still a bit drunk. That old hangover is just toying with you, working out when to bite.
I worked out what would make me happy, and I worked out what I wanted to do, and I trained myself to do the job that would make those two things happen.
I held him close and said nothing, all the while telling him silently that he was loved. Oh, but he was loved.
Real friends were the kind where you pick up where you’d left off, whether it be a week since you’d seen each other or two years.
How is it possible to exist with so much pain?
Sometimes, Clark, you are pretty much the only thing that makes me want to get up in the morning.
Know that you hold my heart, my hopes, in your hands.
That evening she glowed. She gave off a vibration of energy that he suspected only he could detect. Do I do this to you?, he wondered, as he watched her eat. Or is this just the relief of being out from under the forbidden eye of that husband of yours?
You can only actually help someone who wants to be helped.
How could you live each day knowing that you were simply whiling away the days until your own death?
All that counts is the truth. Without it you’re basically just juggling people’s daft ideas.