The Making of Us Quotes

“A life without secrets and lies was a simple path to walk”
― Lisa Jewell, The Making of Us

“people do not like to leave the dying in case there is no one there to see them go. Like waiting for a bus, the more time you invest in awaiting the outcome the harder it is to walk away.”
― Lisa Jewell, The Making of Us

“But, you know, you’ve always been sort of… special…” Robyn blinked at these words. That was how she used to feel. When it was just her. Now she only felt special when Jack smiled at her.”
― Lisa Jewell, The Making of Us

“She’d once read that David Attenborough had been asked what was the most incredible animal he’d ever seen, and he’d replied: a two-year-old child. She agreed with him. Babies she liked and older children were fascinating, but a small child, a toddler, a creature that had spent a year learning to walk, that was beginning to talk, that was incapable of lying or of knowing that it was being lied to, utterly without guile or malice, was a rare thing. A precious thing. An all-too-fleeting thing.”
― Lisa Jewell, The Making of Us

“So this is what it comes down to. Utility bills and bureaucracy. Everything in this life comes down to paperwork eventually.”
― Lisa Jewell, The Making of Us

“In her bathroom mirror Maggie washed away her happy face of foundation, Touche Éclat and sapphire eyeliner. She had not had a facial in over six months. The Botox and the fillers had long since faded away and her skin was pale and dry. She removed the makeup quickly and efficiently, trying not to look for too long at the old, lonely woman in the mirror staring back at her.”
― Lisa Jewell, The Making of Us

“There she lay, her fists curled inward toward her ears, a living, breathing amalgamation of a hundred thousand different people, all of whom had at some point in their lives had a night of passion with somebody else and made another one, outward and onward in ever-increasing circles, an unstoppable force of humanity extrapolating itself across millennia. Until here, in a small cottage in a Bury St. Edmunds backwater, it was all distilled down into one perfect, creamy pearl—Matilda.”
― Lisa Jewell, The Making of Us

“It was 7:30 and Jeannie was upstairs with Matilda, having offered to read her her bedtime story while Maggie got on with dinner. Maggie could hear Matilda overhead, scampering up and down the landing, screaming with high-pitched excitement, and realized that Jeannie had fallen into the oldest trap in the book: attempting to endear herself to a small child by making it laugh, prompting an endless cycle that resulted, on the whole, in hysteria and ended shortly thereafter in tears. Maggie raised her eyebrows and smiled. It was nice to hear life in her house. She did enjoy living alone, but it was at moments like these that she remembered what it had felt like when her house was full of other people’s lives.”
― Lisa Jewell, The Making of Us

“Death was playing a childish game, tiptoeing around mischievously: “Here I am! Oh, no, only joking, I’m over here… no, over here!” Every time she asked a nurse, “How long? How long do you think?” she would be met with the same response. It could be any time. Death did not just hit you with a stick and then walk away and leave you to die. Death fiddled about with you first. Death forced you headfirst into the toilet bowl of your demise and then yanked you back by the collar. Death was not as simple as Maggie had imagined.”
― Lisa Jewell, The Making of Us

“She groaned: Hey babe. Didn’t matter how good someone smelled if they sent you text messages that began Hey babe.”
― Lisa Jewell, The Making of Us

“She felt it for a moment then, the desperate ache she sometimes felt looking at other people, the ache of never being able to be them, not for even a moment, of always having to be herself.”
― Lisa Jewell, The Making of Us

“From behind she looked like a cheap sofa”
― Lisa Jewell, The Making of Us

“She wanted to be alone. But she didn’t want to be all on her own.”
― Lisa Jewell, The Making of Us

“My sisters both had Rett syndrome. It wasn’t supposed to happen twice but then they found it was down to a mutation in my dad’s sperm.”
― Lisa Jewell, The Making of Us