Loved and Missed Quotes

“I felt arrows of rage rising in me, fraught images spreading like bloodstains. There’s no point, I told myself. I reached for the ordinary decoys. It won’t get you anywhere. Think of the outcome you want and make sure you are moving towards it. Got to be practical. That’s what I always told the girls at school. There is so much in life that doesn’t matter, so many things that hold you back, hem you in and throw you off the scent of what’s important. Don’t get too bogged down in things that don’t count or things you cannot influence, and specifically don’t worry too much about making sure others know you’re in the right, because it so easily gets in the way of what you want and need. Become an expert at shrugging most of life off and free yourself for what really interests you. Hone your focus. Don’t bother with cleaning or tidiness beyond basic hygiene. Don’t make your appearance your primary concern. It will zap all your creativity. Be as self-sufficient as you dare. Sometimes you hold more strength when people don’t know what you think or feel, so be very careful whom you confide in. People can run with your difficulties when you least expect it, distort them, relish them even, and before you know it they’re not yours any more. Respect your privacy. And earn you own money or you’ll lack power. Take good care of your friendships, nurture them and they’ll strengthen you. Don’t turn frowning at the defects of other people into a hobby, delicious though it may be; it poisons you. Read every day—it is a practice that dignifies humans. Become a great reader of books and it will help you with reality, you’ll more easily grasp the truth of things and that will set you up for life. And don’t expose your brain to low-quality art forms because there will be a certain measure of pollution.”
― Susie Boyt, Loved and Missed

“I need more resilience, apparently. “You know what Dad’s like.” So I said, I think resilience as a word is morally bankrupt. It’s what people require of you when they don’t intend to treat you very well.”
― Susie Boyt, Loved and Missed

“Jean’s capacity to bounce back in life always impressed me. The way she held herself in high regard. It was a form of personal, almost bodily optimism, you could say. Integrity that went deep and was to be admired. She knew herself well, of course, not just her likes and dislikes but the way her various wounds quickened things in her that might not help a situation. She put all her self-knowledge to good use. She had been kind to her weaknesses in life, and perhaps because of that they scarcely troubled her any more. They had come up in the world.”
― Susie Boyt, Loved and Missed

“I hardened myself deliberately. I felt myself change in that minute. I saw my fingers stiffening, caught a different rhythm in my breaths. It was rage, I suppose. Terrible in life when you wanted to give everything and there wasn’t anyone willing to receive you. Some people believed that if your mother wasn’t all that bothered about you she must know more than anyone what you were really like, deep down, because she sort of invented you so, so there had to be something really wrong with you then. I didn’t think that way myself. But I had read it was important to allow all the feelings in so they had no power over you and you could be set free. Not to hold back on anything because it was too bad to say. To have a mother who wasn’t maternal.”
― Susie Boyt, Loved and Missed

“When did I learn the more you wanted from people, the less they gave? Early on.”
― Susie Boyt, Loved and Missed

“In their company, I noticed, I tried to be extra nurturing in my atmosphere. Perhaps I needed them to know that Eleanor was once in possession of valuable things she squandered, which she chose to squander. That is one of the difficult things about personality – in order to convey it effectively there is always that faint smell of acting that muddies things. I needed them to see me in a merciful light. Perhaps it was just that I was very tired.”
― Susie Boyt, Loved and Missed

“He was the kind of man for whom everyday life involved a series of evasions; secrets and hiding were second nature to him, subtle vanishing acts. He valued his privacy so much he didn’t even like being asked how he was.”
― Susie Boyt, Loved and Missed

“I wanted it to be true so much it was true. Sometimes in life you have to let your heart and bones off the hook of yourself.”
― Susie Boyt, Loved and Missed

“Well – she’s busy. She has a passion of sorts that defines her day. So each day would have purpose, and she has friends who live in the same way who sort of plan things and then relax together, so she certainly would have good times, where she would feel safe and sort of mellow. I hope. A bit floppy, maybe, like when you’ve worked really hard and look forward to a lovely rest. But I wonder if it gets her down that she doesn’t use her talents more, isn’t able to express herself in that way, because she’s clever and she could really do something amazing if she . . . Hard to say. Hard to say I suppose what makes a happy life.”
― Susie Boyt, Loved and Missed

“You ever wish that you’d . . . ’ I waited for more, but her question politely disintegrated. But then, although no more words were forthcoming, she tilted her head slightly and suddenly what she’d asked me picked up its current and expanded wildly. I smiled a huge smile. ‘Of course I do. All the time!”
― Susie Boyt, Loved and Missed

“It kind of sounds like the person tried to be loving, but the target moved,” she begins. “Or…or…they maybe just weren’t very good at it.”
― Susie Boyt, Loved and Missed

“Jean’s encouragement of me that week was crazy. She stirred it into stews. She baked it into cakes. You can be anything you want to be, you can do whatever you like, and there is nothing, nothing you cannot have; she recited these sorts of things at the bus stop, or while we were doing our teeth. We ate custard creams at bedtime and did our teeth again and then had a couple more. ‘What the fuck,’ Jean said. There was never any ‘considering’ in Jean’s encouragement of me, no ‘after what you’ve gone through/been through/ come through’ – which I appreciated. Sometimes I heard in her bright enthusiasm ‘you can be anything I want’, but that might have been unfair.”
― Susie Boyt, Loved and Missed

“Sometimes in life you have to let your heart and bones off the hook of yourself.”
― Susie Boyt, Loved and Missed

“Let me share it with you,’ he said, his voice so soft. ‘Hand it over to me. Let the feeling travel across your shoulders and down your arm and through your fingertips and into my safe keeping.’ ‘Thank you.’ ‘Everybody has difficult feelings to manage some of the time. It’s part of what life is. I’m sure you were better than you know.”
― Susie Boyt, Loved and Missed

“Sometimes I think there was something about loving my own child that provoked fury in the part of me that had gone unloved myself.”
― Susie Boyt, Loved and Missed

“Lena knew Eleanor when she was little, serving me huge breastfeeder’s portions when I went in starving on the Saturday afternoons after my mother died. I was the only person I ever heard of whom grief made ravenous. I wheeled the pram up the three shallow steps, hoping the smell of the food on the grill would not wake the baby. I always had the same thing at the corner table, the special offer: cubes of lamb, burnt on the outside, rosy at their middles, with chips and rice and pitta bread and smoky onions and chopped salad and yoghurt and cucumber, and a cup of English tea. Kept me going for a couple of days then. I was eating for three.”
― Susie Boyt, Loved and Missed

“There was a kebab house near where we lived, a family-run place very warm from the grill at the back of the long oblong room and from the heart of the Greek woman, Lena, who owned and managed it. I wandered up there. It was the perfect place to go after a day spent destroying things. Lena was standing in the doorway, protective, benevolent. She held out her arms. She had a tremendous atmosphere of courage. It might have been all that time spent in proximity to hot coals. I let her envelop me. I breathed her in, charred meat, rose water, oregano, freckled pillow flesh. I had the sense I was forgiven.”
― Susie Boyt, Loved and Missed

“The stories were already wearing thin, shop-soiled. Caroline’s great-grandmother said to her grandmother, ‘Darling, you do not have to marry money, but you must marry where money is.’ So odd that Caroline would want such idiocy known.”
― Susie Boyt, Loved and Missed

“I thought about Caroline sometimes when I was falling asleep, trying to tease out inconsistencies. She was a low-level irritant, a gnat with inflated ideas about itself, a football team I would not wear the scarf of even if caught in a freak blizzard. The facts of her scraped against my nerves. She detested Wordsworth yet she was a terrific fan of psychoanalysis? That didn’t work. She did not believe in umbrellas – they were a suburban invention; well, she could take it from me that they existed. She thought women with a sweet tooth trivialised themselves. What, all of them? (Jean would have to curb her cake habit – why should she?) She objected to English people who hadn’t grown up in London. She despised the word ‘very’ because it de-intensified and people didn’t realise. Couldn’t countenance pelmets. She liked scuffed brogues, left-overs, pinstripes, neat whisky, old Soho, the squeak of tulip stalks, tomato sandwiches for every meal (she’d stolen that straight out of F. Scott Fitzgerald). She said a femme fatale should have a laugh that was alluring and dismissive. She loved all swear words except ‘Christ!’ – which was blasphemous.”
― Susie Boyt, Loved and Missed

“I spoke to the parents at the funeral and they were from a different planet to the older pair: singing her praises fluently, sobbing in between sentences with no self-censure, smiling and wiping their noses on their sleeves, expressions of gratitude bright in the air where you might have expected bitter curses. To have the sort of loss that allowed you to be loving outwardly, to seize another’s hands, holding on to everything offered so strongly, almost as though teaching a new dance, gathering everybody in, without shame, to be that generous in receiving consolation, completely open-hearted, during the throes of tragedy. It was beyond imagining. Loss did not make this couple desolate and punishing. They were comradely. I was so inspired. I just nodded and nodded and my eyes were wet too and I told them how lovely and amazing she was at school, brightening, cheering, soaring. Poppy’s tiny sisters chased round the garden, for now, oblivious.”
― Susie Boyt, Loved and Missed

“It was so hard in life to know what to allow yourself,”
― Susie Boyt, Loved and Missed

“world was Eleanor’s widow,”
― Susie Boyt, Loved and Missed

“I think resilience as a word is morally bankrupt. It's what people require of you when they don't intend to treat you very well.”
― Susie Boyt, Loved and Missed

“Terrible in life when you wanted to give everything and there wasn’t anyone willing to receive you.”
― Susie Boyt, Loved and Missed

“I thought of him as a long-lost relation. A sailor coming into port- agitated, sweat on his brow- who needed somewhere calm to lay his head. He was good company. And it was hard for me to feel I was stealing from anyone when there was so much loss in the air.”
― Susie Boyt, Loved and Missed