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"All families have their secrets, most people would never know them, but they know there are spaces, gaps where the answers should be, where someone should have sat, where someone used to be. A name that is never uttered, or uttered just once and never again. We all have our secrets."
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"What thumbsuckers we all are...when it comes to mothers."

"Of course there are mothers,squeezing their breastsdry, pawning their bodies,shedding teeth for their children,or that's our fond belief.But remember - Hanseland Gretel were dumped in the forestbecause their parents were starving."

"Happy or unhappy, families are all mysterious. We have only to imagine how differently we would be described - and will be, after our deaths - by each of the family members who believe they know us."

"To each other, we were as normal and nice as the smell of bread. We were just a family. In a family even exaggerations make perfect sense."

"As a mother, you need to remember that a loving and compassionate God is one hundred percent aware of your child's situation."

"He promised us that everything would be okay. I was a child, but I knew that everything would not be okay. That did not make my father a liar. It made him my father."

"My father's attitude was that this was but an inevitable phase of my growing up and he affected to take it lightly. But beneath his jocular, boys-together air, he was at a loss, he was frightened. Perhaps he had supposed that my growing up would bring us closer together- whereas, now that he was trying to find out something about me, I was in full flight from him. I did not want him to know me. I did not want anyone to know me. And then, again, I was undergoing with my father what the very young inevitably undergo with their elders: I was beginning to judge him. And the very harshness of this judgment, which broke my heart, revealed, though I could not have said it then, how much I had loved him, how that love, along with my innocence, was dying."

"But the last one: the baby who trails her scent like a flag of surrender through your life when there will be no more coming after - oh, that's love by a different name. She is the babe you hold in your arms for an hour after she's gone to sleep. If you put her down in the crib, she might wake up changed and fly away. So instead you rock by the window, drinking the light from her skin, breathing her exhaled dreams. Your heart bays to the double crescent moons of closed lashes on her cheeks. She's the one you can't put down."
Explore more quotes by Cecelia Ahern

"I never grew up thinking the goal in life was to be a millionaire. All the way through college, I had a part-time job. I worked hard to get the things that you need at that age."

"I don't want to beone of those easily forgotten people, so important at the time, so special, soinfluential, and so treasured, yet years later just a vague face and a distantmemory."

"If you have a dream, you want to at least be able to try to achieve it in some way. Something that is seemingly beyond your grasp but that you know that with a bit of hard work you could possibly achieve."

"Ruby: ...What's so good about being 20? I call them the materialist years. The years we get distracted by all the bullshit. Then we cop on when we hit our 30s and spend those years trying to make up for the 20s. But your 40s? Those years are for enjoying it.Rosie: Hmmm good point. What are the 50s for?Ruby: Fixing what you fucked up in your 40s.Rosie: Great. Looking forward to it."

"She roared with laughter. Passersby gave her strange looks, but she didn't care. If she'd been able to stretch her vision to see beyond the trees he disappeared behind, she would have stopped laughing. She would have seen the couple who'd been in the dark street near the restaurant the previous night, again breaking into laughter when he felt it was safe to abandon the Wally persona. Everywhere she saw that one man, she didn't see the woman behind him, with him, beside him, urging him on, supporting him. If she had, she might have wondered then who the display was really for."

"Our life is made up of time; our days are measured in hours, our pay measured by those hours, our knowledge is measured by years. We grab a few quick minutes in our busy day to have a coffee break. We rush back to our desks, we watch the clock, we live by appointments. And yet your time eventually runs out and you wonder in your heart of hearts if those seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years and decades were being spent the best way they possibly could. In other words, if you could change anything, would you?"

"Courage does not take over, it fights and struggles through every word you say and every step you take. It's a battle or a dance as to whether you let it pervade. It takes courage to overcome, but it takes extreme fear to be courageous."
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