Still Me (Me Before You #3)

by Jojo Moyes

You’re going to feel uncomfortable in your new world for a bit. It always does feel strange to be knocked out of your comfort zone.

Books are what teach you about life. Books teach you empathy. But you can’t buy books if you barely got enough to make rent. So that library is a vital resource! You shut a library, Louisa, you don’t just shut down a building, you shut down hope.”

To other people the end of my relationship might have been comprehensible, but to me it somehow made no sense at all.

and once I was fully away from him, the parts of me that felt scorched, destroyed, would eventually heal.

All this nonsense about women having it all. We never could and we never shall. Women always have to make the difficult choices. But there is a great consolation in simply doing something you love.”

“You know,” she said, “when you get to my age, the pile of regrets becomes so huge it can obscure the view terribly.”

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.”

I thought about how you’re shaped so much by the people who surround you, and how careful you have to be in choosing them for this exact reason, and then I thought, despite all that, in the end maybe you have to lose them all in order to truly find yourself.

There are so many versions of ourselves we can choose to be.

The key was making sure that anyone you allowed to walk beside you didn’t get to decide which you were, and pin you down like a butterfly in a case. The key was to know that you could always somehow find a way to reinvent yourself again.