Sarra Manning > Quotes

“That was the worst thing about having a relationship with someone, even a pretend relationship. You opened up, let someone in, and when it was over, they had all the ammunition they needed to completely destroy you.”
― Sarra Manning, You Don't Have to Say You Love Me

“One day you’ll wake up and find that the pain’s still there but it doesn’t hurt quite so much.”
― Sarra Manning

“The thing about love was that it caught you unawares, turned up in the most unexpected places, even when you weren't looking for it.”
― Sarra Manning, You Don't Have to Say You Love Me

“I'd always thought that my awkwardness was a thin veil disguising the real me. The me that was funny and could write songs that touched people. The me that would one day find some beautiful, intelligent boy who'd recognize me as his soul mate. The me who was secretly pretty and stylish if only someone would lift the veil and see. But I was beginning to suspect that underneath the awkwardness there was just more awkwardness and not much else. And that would explain why I stood in a room full of people and felt like the loneliest girl in the world.”
― Sarra Manning, Guitar Girl

“What she lacks in poetry she makes up for in venom”
― Sarra Manning

“And suddenly I got what the big deal was about kissing. How someone could suck on your bottom lip and make you come completely undone. That someone stroking the hair back from your face could make you swoon and someone sliding his hands underneath your top could make you feel wanted for the first time in your life.”
― Sarra Manning, Let's Get Lost

“We're broken. It's like we have all these jagged edges that scare other people off, but when we're with each other, our jagged edges fit together and we're almost whole.”
― Sarra Manning, Unsticky

“I think I needed to be really hurt on the outside so the hurt on the inside would realize that it wasn’t on its own and that it had to come out.”
― Sarra Manning

“I did get lost but I wanted someone to find me.”
― Sarra Manning

“Just once, I'd like to find a boy. And I like him and he likes me. And we have a laugh and the kissing's really good and there's no-one getting in the way of the laughing and the kissing. Is that too much to ask?”
― Sarra Manning, Kiss and Make Up

“I was a heartless, ungrateful wench of a girl who promised everyone who came into contact with me a one-way ticket to pain and hurt. I didn’t know how to love and I didn’t deserve to be loved back.”
― Sarra Manning

“What you look like is just one part of who you are - but it's not all you are.”
― Sarra Manning, You Don't Have to Say You Love Me

“Getting money from my dad is a finesse job. Luckily, I have finesse coming out of my arse. I barged into his study without knocking, marched across to his desk, and held out my hand. “Give me twenty pounds,” I snapped. “I need twenty pounds. Give it to me. Now!”
― Sarra Manning

“...occasionally I can be quite evil, when there's no-one around to realise.”
― Sarra Manning, Kiss and Make Up

“Sometimes it frightens me how much I enjoy behaving like a complete cow.”
― Sarra Manning, Kiss and Make Up

“Never shield your oddness, but wear your oddness as a shield.”
― Sarra Manning

“There was only one way to get through the rest of the evening and it wasn't sober.”
― Sarra Manning, Kiss and Make Up

“I guess they're called moments because they don't last very long.”
― Sarra Manning, You Don't Have to Say You Love Me

“My whole life had split in two: Smith and not Smith. I liked the Smith parts of it so much better.
”
― Sarra Manning, Let's Get Lost

“I suppose the things that you always take for granted, that you don't even notice, are what you miss the most.”
― Sarra Manning, You Don't Have to Say You Love Me

“I think sometimes she lies in bed at night and plots ways to make my life suck.
There can be no other explanation.”
― Sarra Manning, Kiss and Make Up

“Brie! Do Beyonce or Christina or whichever lame MTV diva you're mostly admiring this week waste their time with what-ifs? No, they spend all their energy on looking fabulous and cutting down any bitch that dares get in their way.-Charlie”
― Sarra Manning, Pretty Things

“Then what he said and how he said it won't be important any more. What will be important are all the things you never got to say.”
― Sarra Manning, You Don't Have to Say You Love Me

“...my awkward silence default setting kicked in.”
― Sarra Manning, Kiss and Make Up

“... Veronique and Dylan having the mother of all arguments. I mean, it had a plot and a subplot and several walk-on parts....”
― Sarra Manning, Kiss and Make Up

“When your mother doesn't want to have the sex talk with you any more but instead wants to talk about the possibility that you might have sex on her soft furnishings, it's a watershed moment in any girl's life. I know I'll remember it fondly for many years to come.”
― Sarra Manning, Kiss and Make Up

“You took out a book on blow-job technique from the British Library? They shouldn't have books like that in there!”
― Sarra Manning, You Don't Have to Say You Love Me

“I smile. I smile all the time, but you're just not around to see it these days".”
― Sarra Manning, Kiss and Make Up

“I went out with Veronique to take my mind of you, and when I'm with you I don't feel like I'm on a rebound, I feel like I've come home. It's like my world is just different combinations of black and white, but when you're around everything goes Technicolor. You're still the coolest girl I know".”
― Sarra Manning, Kiss and Make Up

“If Madonna loves me, then you will too.”
― Sarra Manning, You Don't Have to Say You Love Me

“But Neve, you can’t start a book and leave it halfway through,’ he’d said implacably. ‘It’s almost as bad as turning down the corner of the page, instead of using a bookmark.”
― Sarra Manning, You Don't Have to Say You Love Me

“She was so fed up with unrequited love and platonic love and all the other kinds of love that weren’t passionate, romantic, can’t-live-without-you, I-have-to-have-you-right-now, the-beat-of-your-heart-matches-the-beat-of-mine love.”
― Sarra Manning, You Don't Have to Say You Love Me

“Having a relationship and not even a sexual one is so straight, it's practically perverted”
― Sarra Manning, You Don't Have to Say You Love Me

“No one gets through life scot-free. Shit happens. I's how you deal with it that shapes you, not the actual event itself.”
― Sarra Manning, Nine Uses for an Ex-Boyfriend

“. . . Do you want to share a black cab?’
Black cabs were an extravagance that Neve couldn’t afford, not this far away from payday, but that wasn’t the reason why she declined. ‘No, thank you. I’m perfectly all right with catching the tube.’
‘OK, tube it is,’ Max agreed, because he was quite obviously emotionally tone deaf and couldn’t sense the huge ‘kindly bugger off’ vibes that Neve was sure she was emitting.”
― Sarra Manning, You Don't Have to Say You Love Me

“But really it says
everything that’s wrong about the publishing industry, that a
quarter of a million people bought and read a sex and
shopping novel that wasn’t even written by one of those
footballer girlfriends, and yet most of the shortlisted titles on
the Orange Prize, which is an award for women writers,
don’t even sell ten thousand copies. It’s just not right.”
― Sarra Manning, You Don't Have to Say You Love Me

“He was old-fashioned looking, Grace decided. Not just the suit, which made him look as though he should be taking the air in one of those fifties movies on the French Riviera, but as if he was the second male lead in one of those same films. Not matinee-idol handsome enough to get the girl, but good enough to be the best friend of the one who got the girl. Or the arch nemesis of the one who got the girl who had his comeuppance ten minutes before the credits began to roll.”
― Sarra Manning

“Excuse me?’ she spat, and as Dougie and Celia always pointed out, it didn’t matter that Neve never swore because she could make ‘Excuse me?’ sound like ‘Go fuck yourself.”
― Sarra Manning, You Don't Have to Say You Love Me

“So you don’t fancy meeting up again?’ Max persisted, though Neve didn’t know why, because she thought she’d made her position perfectly clear. ‘Swap war stories?’
‘I don’t have any war stories,’ Neve said, and in that moment she felt that she never would. That every night would be spent creeping round her flat in her socks with the telly turned down so low that she could barely hear it, so in the end she’d have no other option but to escape into the pages of books where there were other girls falling in and out of love but not her. Never her. She stared down at the scuffed toes of her faux Ugg boots in sudden and tired defeat.
‘If you don’t have any war stories, then at least you don’t have any war wounds,’ Max said, so quietly that Neve had to strain her ears to catch his words. ‘Take my number.”
― Sarra Manning, You Don't Have to Say You Love Me

“How is dear Charlotte?’ Celia asked sweetly, then launched into an account of how they’d been having their usual ‘Fucking shut up’, ‘No, you fucking shut up’, row a couple of evenings ago, when Yuri had opened the front door of their flat to scream up the stairs, ‘Why don’t both of you fucking shut up?”
― Sarra Manning, You Don't Have to Say You Love Me