John Needham > John's Quotes

“Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”
― C.S. Lewis

“I placed my face so close to his that his features became indistict, and I began to lose myself in them. I stroked his hair, his skin, his brow, with my fingertips, tears sliding unchecked down my cheeks, my nose against his, and all the time he watched me silently, studying me intently as if he were storing each molecule of me away. He was already retreating withdrawing to somewhere I couldn't reach him.
I kissed him, trying to bring him back. 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. I wanted to press every bit of me against him. I wanted to will something into him. I wanted to give him every bit of life I felt and force him to life.
I held him, Will Traynor ex-City whiz kid, ex-stunt diver, sportsman, traveller, lover. I held him close and said nothing, all the while telling him silently that he was loved. Oh, but he was loved.”
― Jojo Moyes, Me Before You

“He extricated himself from her encircling arm and she moaned a little and curled away from him. He moved close again, foetally fitting himself to her shape, wrapping his arm around her waist. She awoke briefly and clasped his hand tightly to her belly, and murmured sleepily, 'I do love you Martin.'
Choked, he buried his face in the smooth nape of her neck, and summoned the courage to tell her what he hadn't dared say; that he loved her too, more than he could ever have imagined possible.”
― John Needham

“The smile came out like a newborn foal – its legs buckled immediately.”
― Chris Cleave, Gold

“I turned in my seat. Will’s face was in shadow and I couldn’t quite make it out.
‘Just hold on. Just for a minute.’
‘Are you all right?’ I found my gaze dropping towards his chair, afraid some part of him was pinched, or trapped, that I had got something wrong.
‘I’m fine. I just . . . ’
I could see his pale collar, his dark suit jacket a contrast against it.
‘I don’t want to go in just yet. I just want to sit and not have to think about . . . ’ He swallowed.
Even in the half-dark it seemed effortful.
‘I just . . . want to be a man who has been to a concert with a girl in a red dress. Just for a few minutes more.’
I released the door handle.
‘Sure.’
I closed my eyes and lay my head against the headrest, and we sat there together for a while longer, two people lost in remembered music, half hidden in the shadow of a castle on a moonlit hill.”
― Jojo Moyes, Me Before You

“Shhh. Just listen. You, of all people. Listen to what Im saying. This...tonight...is the most wonderful thing you could have done for me. What you have told me, what you have done in bringing me here...knowing that, somehow, from that complete arse, I was at the start of this, you managed to salvage something to love is astonishing to me. But...I need it to end here. No more chair. No more pneumonia. No more burning limbs. No more pain and tiredness and waking up every morning already wishing it was over. When we get back, I am still going to go to Switzerland. And if you do love me, Clark, as you say you do, the thing that would make me happier than anything is if you would come with me. So I'm asking you - if you feel the things you say you feel - then do it. Be with me. Give me the end I'm hoping for.”
― Jojo Moyes, Me Before You

“Sad words are just another beauty. A sad story means, this storyteller is alive. The next thing you know something fine will happen to her, something marvelous, and then she will turn around and smile.”
― Chris Cleave, Little Bee

“I am awaiting
perpetually and forever
a renaissance of wonder”
― Lawrence Ferlinghetti

“Life has no meaning. Each of us has meaning and we bring it to life. It is a waste to be asking the question when you are the answer.”
― Joseph Campbell

“I pop a beautiful sentence into my mouth and suck it like a fruit drop.”
― Bohumil Hrabal

“But a mermaid has no tears, and therefore she suffers so much more.”
― Hans Christian Andersen, The Little Mermaid

“All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“The reason it hurts so much to separate is because our souls are connected. Maybe they always have been and will be. Maybe we've lived a thousand lives before this one and in each of them we've found each other. And maybe each time, we've been forced apart for the same reasons. That means that this goodbye is both a goodbye for the past ten thousand years and a prelude to what will come.”
― Nicholas Sparks, The Notebook

“Without you in my arms, I feel an emptiness in my soul. I find myself searching the crowds for your face - I know it's an impossibility, but I cannot help myself.”
― Nicholas Sparks, Message in a Bottle

“While I sleep, I dream of you, and when I wake, I long to hold you in my arms. If anything, our time apart has only made me more certain that I want to spend my nights by your side, and my days with your heart.”
― Nicholas Sparks, Nights in Rodanthe

“There's things that happen in a person's life that are so scorched in the memory and burned into the heart that there's no forgetting them.”
― John Boyne

“Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.”
― Norman Mailer

“His books were the closest thing he had to furniture and he lived in them the way other men live in easy chairs.”
― Laura Hillenbrand, Seabiscuit: An American Legend

“Do your thing and don't care if they like it.”
― Tina Fey, Bossypants

“How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.”
― Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Selected Poems

“The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.”
― Rachel Carson

“If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.”
― Emily Dickinson

“Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.”
― Benjamin Franklin

“The longer I live, the more I observe that carrying around anger is the most debilitating to the person who bears it.”
― Katharine Graham

“The earth was overwhelmed with beauty and indifferent to it, and I went with a heart ready to crack for its unbearable loveliness.”
― Josephine Winslow Johnson, Now in November

“You only get one life. It's actually your duty to live it as fully as possible.”
― Jojo Moyes, Me Before You

“What I've come to learn is that the world is never saved in grand messianic gestures, but in the simple accumulation of gentle, soft, almost invisible acts of compassion.”
― Chris Abani

“Compassion is the basis of morality.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.”
― Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul