I will never, ever regret the things I've done. Because most days, all you have are places in your memory that you can go to.
You can only actually help someone who wants to be helped.
I held him close and said nothing, all the while telling him silently that he was loved. Oh, but he was loved.
Try to write at least 500 words a day. You may ditch 499 of them tomorrow, but you will still be moving forward.
"You cut yourself off from all sorts of experiences because you tell yourself you are 'not that sort of person'" "But, I’m not." "How do you know? You’ve done nothing, been nowhere. How do you have the faintest idea what kind of person you are?"
I'm not going to try and change you mind." "If you're here, you accept it's my choice. This is the first thing I've been in control of since the accident." "I know." And there it was. He knew it, and I knew it. There was nothing left for me to do. Do you know how hard it is to say nothing ? When every atom of you strains to do the opposite? I just tried to be, tried to absorb the man I loved through osmosis, tried to imprint what I had left of him on myself. I did not speak.
Do you know how hard it is to say nothing? When every atom of you strains to do the opposite? I had practiced not saying anything the whole way from the airport, and it was still nearly killing me.
But don't blame me for the food. My wife knows a hundred and one ways to incinerate a cow, and as far as I can tell she's still experimenting.
The only thing Jess really cared about were those two children and letting them know they were okay. Because even if the whole world was throwing rocks at you, if you had your mother at your back, you'd be okay. Some deep-rooted part of you would know you were loved. That you deserved to be loved.
And I don't want to look at you every day, to see you naked,to watch you wandering around the annexe in your crazy dresses and not...not be able to do what I want with you. Oh, Clark,if you had any idea what I want to do to you right now.And I...i can't live with that knowledge. I can't. It's Not who I am. I can't be the kind of man who just...accepts.
I just... want to be a man who has been to a concert with a girl in a red dress. Just for a few minutes more.
Cheap as chips, cheap as chips, it's a British expression. There's no couture in their darling.
If all we are allowed is hours, minutes, I want to be able to etch each of them on to my memory with exquisite clarity so that I can recall them at moments like this, when my very soul feels blackened.
It's complicated.' 'So's quantitative easing. But I still get that it means printing money.
I told him I loved him,” she said, her voice dropping to a whisper. “And he just said it wasn’t enough.” Her eyes were wide and bleak . “How am I supposed to live with that?
I was once told by someone wise that writing is perilous as you cannot always guarantee your words will be read in the spirit in which they were written.
I let him know a hurt had been mended in a way that he couldn’t have known, and for that alone there would always be a piece of me indebted to him.
They began to tune up, and suddenly the auditorium was filled with a single sound - the most alive, three-dimensional thing I had ever heard. It made the hairs on my skin stand up, my breath catch in my throat....I felt the music like a physical thing; it didn't just sit in my ears, it flowed through me, around me, made my senses vibrate. It made my skin prickle and my palms dampen...It was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard.
Push yourself. Don't Settle. Just live well. Just LIVE.
I worked out what would make me happy, and I worked out what I wanted to do, and I trained myself to do the job that would make those two things happen
Push yourself. Don’t settle. Wear those stripy legs with pride. And if you insist on settling down with some ridiculous bloke, make sure some of this is squirreled away somewhere. Knowing you still have possibilities is a luxury. Knowing I might have given them to you has alleviated something for me.
Everything takes time... and that's something that your generation find it a lot harder to adjust to. You have all grown up expecting things to go your way almost instantaneously. You all expect to live the lives you chose. Especially a successful young man like yourself. But it takes time.
Because even if the whole world was throwing rocks at you, if you still had your mother or father at your back, you'd be okay.
There is a whole lot more to life than winning.
Just hold on. Just for a minute." "Are you all right ?" I found my gaze dropping towards his chair, afraid some part of him was pinched, or trapped, that I had got something wrong. "I'm fine. I just...I don't want to go in just yet. I just want to sit and not have to think about...I just...want to be a man who has been to a concert with a girl in a red dress. Just for a few minutes more.
I realized I was afraid of living without him. How is it you have the right to destroy my life, I wanted to demand of him, but I’m not allowed a say in yours? But I had promised.
There are normal hours, and then there are invalid hours, where time stalls and slips, where life---real life---seems to exist at one remove.
... if you're going to wear a dress like that you need to wear it with confidence. You need to fill it out mentally as well as physically.
How is it possible to exist with so much pain?
I chose to believe that God, a benign God, would understand our sufferings and forgive us our trespasses.
Some mistakes... Just have greater consequences than others. But you don't have to let the result of one mistake be the thing that defines you. You, Clark, have the choice not to let that happen.
You only get one life. It's actually your duty to live it as fully as possible.
Astonishingly, not all girls get dressed just to please men.
Just live well. Just live
Real friends were the kind where you pick up where you'd left off, whether it be a week since you'd seen each other or two years.
Sometimes, Clark, you are pretty much the only thing that makes me want to get up in the morning.
Sometimes life is a series of obstacles, a matter of putting one foot in front of the other. Sometimes, she realizes suddenly, it is simply a matter of blind faith.
I hadn’t realized that music could unlock things in you, could transport you to somewhere even the composer hadn’t predicted. It left an imprint in the air around you, as if you carried its remnants with you when you went.
I kissed him, trying to bring him back. I kissed him and let my lips rest against his so that our breath mingled and the tears from my eyes became salt on his skin, and I told myself that, somewhere, tiny particles of him would become tiny particles of me, ingested, swallowed, alive, perpetual. I wanted to press every bit of me against him. I wanted to will something into him. I wanted to give him every bit of life I felt and force him to live.
The thing about being catapulted into a whole new life--or at least, shoved up so hard against someone else's life that you might as well have your face pressed against their window--is that it forces you to rethink your idea of who you are. Or how you might seem to other people.
And it was suddenly very simple: There was no choice.
All I can say is that you make me... you make me into someone I couldn't even imagine. You make me happy, even when you're awful. I would rather be with you - even the you that you seem to think is diminished - than with anyone else in the world.
"What if I like watching television? What if I don't want to do much else other than read a book?"... "What if I'm tired when I get home? What if I don't fill my days with frenetic activity?" "But one day you might wish you had."
She does not want to feel even the faintest temptation to call his mobile number, as she had done obsessively for the first year after his death so she could hear his voice on the answering service. Most days now his loss is a part of her, an awkward weight she carries around, invisible to everyone else, subtly altering the way she moves through the day. But today, the Anniversary of the day he died, is a day when all bets are off.
I am conscious that knowing me has caused you pain, and grief, and I hope that one day when you are less angry with me and less upset you will see not just that I could only have done the thing that I did, but also that this will help you live a really good life, a better life, than if you hadn’t met me.
Only you, Will Traynor, could tell a woman how to wear a bloody dress.
All that counts is the truth. Without it you're basically just juggling people's daft ideas.
And then, just like that, my heart broke. My face crumpled, my composure went and I held him tightly and I stopped caring that he could feel the shudder of my sobbing body because grief swamped me. It overwhelmed me and tore at my heart and my stomach and my head and it pulled me under, and I couldn’t bear it. I honestly thought I couldn’t bear it.
Nobody fights you like your own sister; nobody else knows the most vulnerable parts of you and will aim for them without mercy.
She went kind of pink and laughed, the kind of laugh you do when you know yo shouldn't be laughing. The kind of laugh that spoke of a conspiracy.
But just as nature abhors a vacuum -- so does the human heart.
I thought the world had actually ended. I thought nothing good could ever happen again. I thought anything might happen if I wasn't vigilant. I didn't eat. I didn't go out. I didn't want to see anyone. But I survived, Paul. Much to my own surprise, I got through it. And life...well, gradually became livable again.
He smelt of the sun, as if it had seeped deep into his skin, and I found myself inhaling silently, as if he were something delicious.
How could you live each day knowing that you were simply whiling away the days until your own death?
...I told him a story of two people. Two people who shouldn't have met, and who didn't like each other much when they did, but who found they were the only two people in the world who could possibly have understood each other.
You know, you spend your whole life feeling like you don't quite fit in anywhere. And then you walk into a room one day, whether it's at university or an office or some kind of club, and you just go, 'Ah. There they are.' And suddenly you feel at home.
I thought, briefly, that I would never feel as intensely connected to the world, to another human being, as I did at that moment.
I see all this talent, all this...this energy and brightness and...potential. Yes. Potential. And I cannot for the life of me see how you can be content to live this tiny life. This life that will take place almost entirely within a five mile radius and contain nobody who will ever surprise you or push you or show you things that will leave your head spinning and unable to sleep at night.
Somewhere in this world is a man who loves you, who understands how precious and clever and kind you are. A man who has always loved you and, to his detriment, suspects he always will.
Sometimes when you get hammered till the small hours you feel pretty good in the morning, but really it's just because you're still a bit drunk. That old hangover is just toying with you, working out when to bite.
Believe me, you have to have a certain confidence in your powers of descretion to let a dentist loose with a drill in your mouth less than an hour after you've...um...entertained his wife.
If you'd bothered to ask me, Clark, if you'd bothered to consult me just once about this so-called fun outing of ours, I could have told you. I hate horses, and horse racing. Always have. But you didn't bother to ask me. You decided what you thought you'd like me to do, and you went ahead and did it. You did what everyone else does. You decided for me.
That evening she glowed. She gave off a vibration of energy that he suspected only he could detect. Do I do this to you?, he wondered, as he watched her eat. Or is this just the relief of being out from under the forbidden eye of that husband of yours?
I frowned at the list. “So… I’ll go back and tell the Traynors that I’m going to get their suicidal quadriplegic son drunk, spend their money on strippers and lap dancers, and then trundle him off to the Disability Olympics—
Know that you hold my heart, my hopes, in your hands.
There is a hunger in you. A fearlessness. You just buried it, like most people do.
We are all part of some great cycle, some pattern that it was only God's purpose to understand.
So this is it. You are scored on my heart, Clark. You were from the first day you walked in, with your ridiculous clothes and your bad jokes and your complete inability to ever hide a single thing you felt.
You're going to feel uncomfortable in your new world for a bit. It always does feel strange to be knocked out of your comfort zone.
I know this isn’t a conventional love story. I know there are all sorts of reasons I shouldn’t even be saying what I am. But I love you. I do. I knew it when I left Patrick. And I think you might even love me a little bit.
If I don't cry while writing a key emotional scene, my gut feeling is it's failed.
When you put someone down all the time, eventually they stop listening to the sensible stuff.
I could hear her babbling away beside me, but I wasn't really paying attention. I could barely focus on anything. My nerve endings seemed to have come alive; they almost jangled with anticipation I was going to see Will. Whatever else, I had that. I could almost feel the miles between us shrinking, as if we were at two ends of some invisible elastic thread.
Sit here long enough you get to know everything. You listen, see ?" She taps the side of her head. "Nobody listens any more. Everyone knows what they want to hear, but nobody actually listens.
I can't do this because I can't...I can't be the man I want to be with you. And that means that this - this just becomes...another reminder of what I am not.
