Bitter Sweet Quotes

“I was still trying to comprehend the enormousness of what I couldn’t feel, but the wine didn’t help. There must be something so wrong with me, I thought for the millionth time in my life. Normal people aren’t like this.”
― Hattie Williams, Bitter Sweet

“When she died, I felt as if my world stopped turning. As if I was frozen in time. In the years and weeks and days since, when I’d think of her, I’d feel like a little girl, not a professional woman, not an independent adult. Every heartbreak, every flu, every birthday and Christmas, it would hit me, and it would, I guessed, for the rest of my life.”
― Hattie Williams, Bitter Sweet

“By the time we left New York, there was a group of us who were so bonded it had felt like it might be impossible to ever leave them, to unpick the beautiful tangle of our lives. But we had, and I knew it was right for us and our daughter to finally”
― Hattie Williams, Bitter Sweet

“I couldn’t feel the familiar, feathered hands of the depression that I knew still lived inside me.”
― Hattie Williams, Bitter Sweet

“Nothing I imagined could be worse than being taken away from London and the ruined remains of my life.”
― Hattie Williams, Bitter Sweet

“While Eddy and Ophelia were at work, I slept, drank and chain-smoked. I walked around the house like a specter, into their bedrooms, through the halls. For the most part, I felt utterly empty and miserable. Sometimes I felt angry, or desperate. I wanted to die, for it all to be over, yet I had no strength to do anything about it.”
― Hattie Williams, Bitter Sweet

“And so I sat and waited, again, watching other people arrive, get called, come back and go again. Women of all ages and walks of life. Women with children and women without. Women who looked more like children, and women who looked too old to be mothers. But here we all were, sitting, asking for the same thing, to make the same choice. A choice that was ours and ours alone.”
― Hattie Williams, Bitter Sweet

“I did what he told me, taking off my thick wool socks and jeans in as dignified manner as I could. He lifted me onto the kitchen counter and kissed me again, and then loosened his belt and undid his own jeans and we had sex there, in his kitchen, next to the bowl of clementines, a piece of orange still stuck in my throat.”
― Hattie Williams, Bitter Sweet

“There must be something so wrong with me, I thought for the millionth time in my life. Normal people aren’t like this.”
― Hattie Williams, Bitter Sweet

“I watched the animation reflected in Noah’s thick glasses; he had appalling eyesight even at four. I wondered if he knew it was about loss and death, and not just a flying snowman. I hoped he didn’t.”
― Hattie Williams, Bitter Sweet

“But I would never sell it. Every time I looked at it, I told myself, I would remember that he loved me.”
― Hattie Williams, Bitter Sweet

“Since Oscar had asked her to move in with him, Ophelia had been less interested in the car crash of my own love life. She was undoubtedly glad to be getting away from me and my mess, and had given up the fight, resigned to the fact that I was going to be with Richard until it all fell apart.”
― Hattie Williams, Bitter Sweet

“She was wearing her usual rain mac and skinny jeans, which today were tucked into black boots with a thin, spiked heel that looked like a murder weapon. Her clothes were so expensive and stylish. Again, in her presence, I felt dowdy and poor. It didn’t matter that I was working all hours on a book campaign as big as this. I was still broke.”
― Hattie Williams, Bitter Sweet

“Arrangement is one word for it, I suppose. He cheats on her and she doesn’t do a thing about it, because she loves him too much to leave him. And he’s too selfish to do anything other than what he wants to, so she accepts it. That’s how I’d put it. You are not the first and I can guarantee that you won’t be the last.” At that moment, Richard appeared. He looked crumpled and broken, like an unmade bed. If he had overheard our conversation, he didn’t let on.”
― Hattie Williams, Bitter Sweet

“At that moment, Richard appeared. He looked crumpled and broken, like an unmade bed. If he had overheard our conversation, he didn’t let on.”
― Hattie Williams, Bitter Sweet

“They were so tanned and sun-damaged that they looked like a pair of walnuts.”
― Hattie Williams, Bitter Sweet

“Finn is hot for you, Charlie,” Eddy said to me as we lay in our huge brass bed that night, drunk on sunshine and beer. A little fan blew the hot air sadly and noisily around the room. “You should go there. He is one of the most beautiful men I have ever seen in real life.”
― Hattie Williams, Bitter Sweet

“Those little cigarettes do look good on you.” I knew that the feeling I got from his compliments was nicer than it should have been, but there is nothing like being told you look French to gladden the heart.”
― Hattie Williams, Bitter Sweet

“The sunlight cracked into discs and rippled on the surface of the water, which was a shade paler than the blue of the sky. It would be too hot to be in the sun soon.”
― Hattie Williams, Bitter Sweet

“The pleasure I got from sex with him was something else, something more powerful. It connected me to him, to be so disconnected, it allowed me to see things from above—it wasn’t something I could give words to, even if I’d had someone to tell.”
― Hattie Williams, Bitter Sweet

“It didn’t occur to me that there would have been other women, and other affairs. He had told me that she knew he had something going on, so it should have been obvious to me. But I saw only what I wanted to see, because I was blind with love for him and high on the feeling of importance that he gave me in return for all the sex he wanted. For the first time in my adult life, I felt validated. I could hardly remember my life before him.”
― Hattie Williams, Bitter Sweet

“She was some hangover, some complication that I wanted gone so much I hoped that by just pretending she wasn’t there it might manifest as the truth. If only, I’d think to myself, if only she would die, or leave him, whatever. Then we’d be together. I was cruel to her in this respect, and for all my faults I wasn’t usually a cruel person, but she had done nothing in her life as far as I could tell to warrant my kindness or understanding.”
― Hattie Williams, Bitter Sweet

“when it did, I would feel a rush of cortisol-soaked panic disperse in my chest like an injection of ink into water.”
― Hattie Williams, Bitter Sweet

“By mid-July I had become so used to the light lasting late into the evening and the weather being warm that winter seemed like science fiction.”
― Hattie Williams, Bitter Sweet

“He bought Eddy lovely clothes and had kinks that would be too much for our straight ears, he told us.”
― Hattie Williams, Bitter Sweet

“But I knew that she wouldn’t understand this. That she would try to stop me, that Eddy would, too, and I didn’t want to be stopped. No matter how else I rationalized it, with thoughts like, I don’t have to tell them everything and it is to protect his privacy and I want to keep this for myself, it came down to the fact that I didn’t want anything to get in the way of what was about to happen, because I wanted it so much.”
― Hattie Williams, Bitter Sweet

“I lit a cigarette and kept walking, keeping my feet moving in tempo with my heart, imagining the feeling of arms wrapped tightly around me, slowly pulling myself back together.”
― Hattie Williams, Bitter Sweet

“And off he went, down the stairs and away from me and my racing heart.”
― Hattie Williams, Bitter Sweet

“In the carriage of the Piccadilly line train to Covent Garden I checked my makeup in the cracked compact mirror that had belonged to my mum, which I carried with me everywhere. I carefully put on some red lipstick, taking care not to get any on my teeth, and smudged it in to look more natural. I gently brushed my thick fringe with a little fold-up brush, and refreshed my eyeliner. An elderly”
― Hattie Williams, Bitter Sweet

“I found some of my university friends to drink with and that night we sat on the stony beach, feeling disconnected, listening to the waves in the darkness and wondering what on earth was next, what was out there for us.”
― Hattie Williams, Bitter Sweet