Then She Was Gone Quotes

“When I read a book it feels like real life and when I put the book down it's like I go back into the dream.”
― Lisa Jewell, Then She Was Gone

“A man who can’t love but desperately needs to be loved is a dangerous thing indeed.”
― Lisa Jewell, Then She Was Gone

“As the father of your children, as a friend, as someone who shared a journey with you and as someone who loves you and cares about you. I don’t need to be married to you to be all those things. Those things are deeper than marriage. Those things are for ever.”
― Lisa Jewell, Then She Was Gone

“Stories,” she says, “are the only thing in this world that are real. Everything else is just a dream.”
― Lisa Jewell, Then She Was Gone

“May was like the Friday night of summer: all the good times lying ahead of you, bright and shiny and waiting to be lived.”
― Lisa Jewell, Then She Was Gone

“If she could rewind the timeline, untwist it and roll it back the other way like a ball of wool, she’d see the knots in the yarn, the warning signs. Looking at it backward it was obvious all along.”
― Lisa Jewell, Then She Was Gone

“I remember being twenty-one and thinking that my personality was a solid thing, that me was set in stone, that I would always feel what I felt and believe what I believed. But now I know that me is fluid and shape-changing.”
― Lisa Jewell, Then She Was Gone

“The blame game could be exhausting sometimes. The blame game could make you lose your mind . . . all the infinitesimal outcomes, each path breaking up into a million other paths every time you heedlessly chose one, taking you on a journey that you’d never find your way back from.”
― Lisa Jewell, Then She Was Gone

“Cooking doesn’t just nurture the recipient, it nurtures the chef.”
― Lisa Jewell, Then She Was Gone

“I am brave, and I am brilliant, and I am strong..”
― Lisa Jewell, Then She Was Gone

“Other mothers lose children without losing their husbands, too.” “You didn’t lose me, Laurel. I’m still yours. I’ll always be yours.” “Well, that’s not strictly true, is it?” He sighs again. “Where it counts,” he says. “As the father of your children, as a friend, as someone who shared a journey with you and as someone who loves you and cares about you. I don’t need to be married to you to be all those things. Those things are deeper than marriage. Those things are forever.”
― Lisa Jewell, Then She Was Gone

“People try and make out there’s a greater purpose, a secret meaning, that it all means something. And it doesn’t.”
― Lisa Jewell, Then She Was Gone

“The blame game could make you lose your mind … all the infinitesimal outcomes, each path breaking up into a million other paths every time you heedlessly chose one, taking you on a journey that you’d never find your way back from.”
― Lisa Jewell, Then She Was Gone

“I will never guilt trip my children when they are adults, she’d vowed. I will never expect more than they are”
― Lisa Jewell, Then She Was Gone

“When I read a book it feels like real life and when I put the book down it’s like I go back into the dream.”
― Lisa Jewell, Then She Was Gone

“Once you had a reputation for being nice you couldn't mess with it.”
― Lisa Jewell, Then She Was Gone

“She’d never worked out how he’d done it, how he’d found that healthy pink part of himself among the wreckage of everything else. But she didn’t blame him. Not in the least. She wished she could do the same; she wished she could pack a couple of large suitcases and say good-bye to herself, wish herself a good life, thank herself for all the memories, look fondly upon herself for just one long, lingering moment and then shut the door quietly, chin up, morning sun playing hopefully on the crown of her head, a bright new future awaiting her. She would do it in a flash. She really would.”
― Lisa Jewell, Then She Was Gone

“That was how she’d once viewed her perfect life: as a series of bad smells and unfulfilled duties, petty worries and late bills.”
― Lisa Jewell, Then She Was Gone

“Do you love him?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Do you love him enough to hurt a lot of people who don’t deserve to be hurt?’ ‘How do you expect me to answer that?’ ‘It’s a tough question, but you do need to answer it. Not now, but over the next hours and days.”
― Lisa Jewell, Then She Was Gone

“I will see you next week, Mum. And if I don’t, then I want you to know that you have been the best and most amazing mother in the world and I have been extraordinarily lucky to have you for so long. And that I adore you. And that we all do. And that you could not have been any better than you were. OK?”
― Lisa Jewell, Then She Was Gone

“All those hopes and dreams and talk of ballerinas and pop stars, concert pianists and boundary-breaking scientists. They all ended up in an office.”
― Lisa Jewell, Then She Was Gone

“Her daughter is dead and her mother is dead and her husband lives with a woman who is nicer than her in a hundred different ways. But she is OK.”
― Lisa Jewell, Then She Was Gone

“May was like the Friday night of summer:”
― Lisa Jewell, Then She Was Gone

“And she felt it then, like a needle in her heart, the love her mother always talked about. ‘You won’t understand how much I love you until you’re a mother yourself.”
― Lisa Jewell, Then She Was Gone

“You know, how you get to forty and you suddenly stop giving a shit about all the stupid things you worried about your whole life.”
― Lisa Jewell, Then She Was Gone

“because I remember being twenty-one and thinking that my personality was a solid thing, that me was set in stone, that I would always feel what I felt and believe what I believed. But now I know that me is fluid and shape-changing. So whatever you’re feeling now, it’s temporary.”
― Lisa Jewell, Then She Was Gone

“And it occurs to her for the very first time that maybe Hanna isn’t intrinsically unhappy. That maybe she just doesn’t like her.”
― Lisa Jewell, Then She Was Gone

“You knew I would, didn’t you?’ She smiles sadly. ‘Oh, I don’t know, I suppose it occurred to me. I would have said something. Soon. I was on the verge. It just didn’t seem like first-date kind of fodder.’ ‘No,’ he says softly. ‘I get that.’ She turns the mug round and round, not sure where to head next with this development.”
― Lisa Jewell, Then She Was Gone

“Stories,' she says, 'are the only thing in this world that are real. Everything else is just a dream.”
― Lisa Jewell, Then She Was Gone

“I thought of what I'd allowed myself to become, for you. I never wanted that bloody child. I only wanted you.”
― Lisa Jewell, Then She Was Gone