The Night She Disappeared Quotes

“Men don’t know, she thinks, they don’t know how having a baby makes you protective of your skin, your body, your space. When you spend all day giving yourself to a baby in every way that it’s possible to give yourself to another human being, the last thing you want at the end of the day is a grown man wanting you to give him things too. Men don’t know how the touch of a hand against the back of your neck can feel like a request, not a gesture of love, how emotional issues become too cumbersome to deal with, how their love for you is too much sometimes, just too much. Kim sometimes thinks that women practise being mothers on men until they become actual mothers, leaving behind a kind of vacancy.”
― Lisa Jewell, The Night She Disappeared

“People are easier to deal with if they underestimate you.”
― Lisa Jewell, The Night She Disappeared

“Kim sometimes thinks that women practice being mothers on men until they become actual mothers, leaving behind a kind of vacancy.”
― Lisa Jewell, The Night She Disappeared

“Zach isn’t liberal. He has no time for political correctness. He is his mother’s son: small-minded, self-absorbed, inward-thinking, a little bit racist, a little bit homophobic, a little bit misogynistic. All those things that don’t matter when you’re fourteen and in love, but start to sprout insidiously to the surface over the years it takes you to go from child to adult, and even now it’s not blatant but she knows him well enough to know that it’s there.”
― Lisa Jewell, The Night She Disappeared

“It’s clearly not a topic he wants to give any oxygen to.”
― Lisa Jewell, The Night She Disappeared

“Yes,” she said. “Yes. A hundred percent. My mum is so cool. And all she wants in the whole world is for me to be happy. So if you make me happy, she’ll like you.”
― Lisa Jewell, The Night She Disappeared

“and she knows that she is somehow being diminished, that the care she is being shown by Scarlett is warped and wrong, that Scarlett has been taught how to love by people who don’t know how to love and that everything she thinks is good is actually bad,”
― Lisa Jewell, The Night She Disappeared

“He left immediately, of course. He never wasted a beat when it came to Scarlett. She was his lifeforce, his meaning. He was nothing before Scarlett and he would return to nothing after her. When she needed him, he came to life, like a marionette taken out of a box.”
― Lisa Jewell, The Night She Disappeared

“There’s a heat contained within their exchange, created from the energy of desperation and loss and frustration and misguided hope, but also from the intimacy that’s built up between the two of them as everything else has peeled away from them and the thing that unites them.”
― Lisa Jewell, The Night She Disappeared

“The knot in Kim’s stomach hardens and she turns to Megs and she says, ‘What the fuck is the matter with you? Huh? I mean, what the fuck is the fucking matter with you? Our kids have been missing for three days. Three days! And all you can do is moan and tut and sigh and act like this is all some kind of massive inconvenience. Well, I’m so sorry to drag you out of the pub, out of your back garden, so sorry to keep you from getting on with your day.”
― Lisa Jewell, The Night She Disappeared

“She is chilled by Megs’s response to this crisis. It makes no sense to her whatsoever. She knows that boys are less terrifying to parent than girls – she’s done both and she knows that she feels less anxious when Ryan is out after dark than Tallulah. But still, it’s been nearly three days. The disappearance of anyone for that amount of time is just fundamentally worrying. Yet Megs is not worried in the least. For a moment, it crosses Kim’s mind that maybe Megs is not worried because she knows something,”
― Lisa Jewell, The Night She Disappeared

“Tallulah’s father was normally very self-centred and distant, but becoming a grandfather seemed to have removed a layer of protection from around his heart.”
― Lisa Jewell, The Night She Disappeared

“But she knows this isn’t true. They’re more than just people. They’re a mood, a feeling, a vibe, an aspiration. They’re like a music video or a trailer for a really cool movie. They’re a billboard poster for a hip clothing brand.”
― Lisa Jewell, The Night She Disappeared

“Sophie’s gut reaction had been no. No no no no no. She was a Londoner. She was independent. She had a career of her own. A social life. Her family lived in London.”
― Lisa Jewell, The Night She Disappeared

“Kim closes her eyes and nods. Men don't know, she things, they don't know how having a baby makes you protective of your skin, your body, your space. When you spend all day giving yourself to another human being, the last thing you want at the end of the day is a grown man wanting you to give him things too. Men don't know how the touch of a hand against the back of your neck can feel like a request, not a gesture of love, how emotional issues become too cumbersome to deal with, how their love for you is too much sometimes, just too much. Kim sometimes thinks that women practice being mothers on men until they become actual mothers, leaving behind a kind of vacancy.”
― Lisa Jewell, The Night She Disappeared

“Men don’t know, she thinks, they don’t know how having a baby makes you protective of your skin, your body, your space. When you spend all day giving yourself to a baby in every way that it’s possible to give yourself to another human being, the last thing you want at the end of the day is a grown man wanting you to give him things too. Men don’t know how the touch of a hand against the back of your neck can feel like a request, not a gesture of love”
― Lisa Jewell, The Night She Disappeared

“Chainsmokers on the sound system.”
― Lisa Jewell, The Night She Disappeared

“The man laughs overloudly. “Just kidding,” he says, and Sophie thinks, There you go, you should never take a man wearing red glasses seriously.”
― Lisa Jewell, The Night She Disappeared

“Her gaze travels across the scene as she waits for him to return, to the clusters of lovely young things curled around one another in little pockets, impenetrable, slightly terrifying, the power and yet the patheticness of them, the know-all- and know-nothing-ness. It’s not just their youth that glitters, she ponders as she watches them, it’s their backgrounds, their innate privilege, the suggestion in the way they touch their hair, the way they hold their drinks, the way they scroll so nonchalantly through their phones. They come from places that aren’t like the places most people come from and they have the high-gloss veneer of money that shines through the scruffiest of exteriors. Sophie comes from modest houses and cars that drive till they die and state schools and weekly Tesco shops and biscuits off plates at her grandma’s flat every Saturday. She hadn’t missed out on anything: there was always food and holidays abroad and shopping trips to Oxford Street and takeaways on Friday nights; there was always enough of everything. Her life was perfect. But it was matte, not gloss.”
― Lisa Jewell, The Night She Disappeared

“And judging by the way people reacted to you at the dinner tonight, they all love you already.” “You think?” “The affection was tangible,” she’d said. “Truly.” And it was true. She’d felt it everywhere Shaun went the night before, the feeling of genuine engagement he left in his wake, the sense that people had been uplifted by him, flattered by his attention, that he’d created a kind of buzz about the new term to come merely by being present, before he’d so much as held an assembly or read a speech.”
― Lisa Jewell, The Night She Disappeared

“I would have thought they were waaaay too edgy and cool for this sort of thing.” Tallulah feels a strange wave of defensiveness pass through her. “They’re just people,” she counters. But she knows this isn’t true. They’re more than just people. They’re a mood, a feeling, a vibe, an aspiration. They’re like a music video or a trailer for a really cool movie. They’re a billboard poster for a hip clothing brand. Within the tiny fishbowl environs of Manton College, they’re basically celebrities.”
― Lisa Jewell, The Night She Disappeared

“Her mum says that musk makes men want to have sex with you. Which strikes Tallulah as unlikely; why would anyone bother doing all the other things you’re supposed to do to make men want to have sex with you if you could just wear a particular perfume and be done with it?”
― Lisa Jewell, The Night She Disappeared

“The front sections of her dark hair are currently a kind of washed-out navy blue; she’d been hoping for the electric blue of the model on the packaging, but like everything in her life, it didn’t turn out how she expected.”
― Lisa Jewell, The Night She Disappeared

“(Kim only really likes babies with dark hair; blond-haired babies freak her out).”
― Lisa Jewell, The Night She Disappeared

“People are easier to deal with if they underestimate you”
― Lisa Jewell, The Night She Disappeared

“Yes, but a boyfriend isn't permanent. A child is permanent. Wherever I go, he goes. Whatever I'm doing, I'm his mother Twenty-four-seven. For the rest of my life. And it's a lot, you know.”
― Lisa Jewell, The Night She Disappeared

“Because people don't care. Everyone goes around thinking they're the centre of the fucking universe, and that people miss them when they don't come to things, but nobody gives a shit.”
― Lisa Jewell, The Night She Disappeared

“arrived”
― Lisa Jewell, The Night She Disappeared

“My mum is so cool. And all she wants in the whole world is for me to be happy. So if you make me happy, she’ll like you.”
― Lisa Jewell, The Night She Disappeared

“He leaves the room pulling the door closed quietly behind him, a gesture so incredibly unlike Zack,
"who usually engages inanimate objects forcefully and noisily”
― Lisa Jewell, The Night She Disappeared