"Nobody ever feels they're doing well with teenagers,' he said. 'I think that's kind of the point of them."

"Just live well. Just live."

"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."

"Nell looks at the label and comes to.'Oh, I'd never wear it. I like to buy things on a cost-per-wear basis. This dress would probably work out at like...thirty pounds a wear. No. I couldn't.''You don't ever do something just because it makes you feel good?' The assistant shrugs. 'Mademoiselle, you need to spend more time in Paris."

"You still don't get it, Clark, do you?' I couldhear the smile in his voice. 'It's not your choice."

"The triumph of hope over experience."

"You should just keep your mouth shout! It gets very tedious having you make a snarky comment about everything that someone says in this group."

"I think there is an awful lot of technology for technology's sake. I have yet to be convinced by my husband that persuading our mobiles to talk to our computers is going to be quicker and more straightforward than scribbling a note in our kitchen diary."

"Its not a matter of giving you a chance. I've watched you these six months becoming a whole different person, someone who is only just beginning to see her possibilities. You have no idea how happy that has made me. I don't want you to be tied to me, to my hospital appointments, to the restrictions on my life. I don't want you to miss out on the things someone else could give you."

"You know, you can't make someone love you again. No matter how much you might want it. Sometimes, unfortunately, the timing is simply... off."

"I want him to live if HE wants to live. If he doesn't, then by forcing him to carry on, you, me..... we become just another shitty bunch of people taking away his choices."

"I hadn't thought that as well as the obvious fears about money, and your future, losing your job would make you feel inadequate, and a bit useless. That it would be harder to get up in the morning then when you were rudely shocked into consciousness by the alarm. That you might miss the people you worked with, no matter how little you had in common with them. Or even that you might find yourself searching for familiar faces as you walked the high street."

"She was always tired, these days. She put on one of those smiles that wasn't really a smile at all, and they went on."

"Some mistakes... just have greater consequences than others. But you don't have to let that night be the thing that defines you."

"I know we can do this. I know it's nothow you would have chosen it, but I know I can make you happy. And 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."

"No journey out of grief was straightforward. There would be good days and bad days. Today was just a bad day, a kink in the road, to be traversed and survived."

"I liked the fact that I could be who I wanted to be without my sister's voice reminding me of who I had been."

"It seemed unfair that despite the fact he could not use them, or feel them, his extremities should cause him so much discomfort."

"I didn't say much; my head was still ringing with the music, and I didn't want it to fade. I kept thinking back to it, the way that Will's friend had been so lost in what he was playing. 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 didn't like it when he looked at me like that. I could never escape the feeling that i was being compared to someone else."

"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."

"Hannah ran past, beaming. I remember that feeling-when you're a kid and it's your birthday and for one day everyone makes you feel like the most special person in the world."

"You don't have to let that one thing be the thing that defines you."

"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."

"I had never considered that you might miss a job like you missed a limb - a constant, reflexive thing. I hadn't thought as well as the obvious fears about money, and your future, losing your job would make you feel inadequate, and a bit useless. That it would be harder to get up in the morning than you were rudely shocked in to consciousness by the alarm. That you might missed the people you worked with, no matter how little you had in common with them."

"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."

"We were enjoying one of those rare summers of utter freedom " no financial responsibility, no debts, no time owing to anybody."

"No. Really. I've thought about it a lot. You learn to live with it, with them. Because they do stay with you, even if they're not living, breathing people any more. It's not the same crushing grief you felt at first, the kind that swamps you, and makes you want to cry in the wrong places and get irrationally angry with all the idiots who are still alive when the person you love is dead. It's just something you learn to accommodate. Like adapting around a whole. I don't know. It's like you become... a doughnut instead of a bun."

"Kind eyes under all the mascara."

"You cut yourself off from all sorts of experience because you tell yourself you re not 'that sort of person."

"It is important not to turn the dead into saints. Nobody can walk in the shadow of a saint."

"They were like animals, men. They found too much eye contact threatening."

"Life is short, right? We both know that. Well, what if you're my chance?"

"When someone we love is snatched from us, it often feels very hard to make plans.Sometimes people feel like they have lost faith in the future, or they become superstitious."

"It's just that the thing you never understand about being a mother, until you are one, is that it is not the grown man - the galumphing, unshaven, stinking, opinionated off-spring - you see before you, with his parking tickets and unpolished shoes and complicated love life. You see all the people he has ever been all rolled up into one.I look at him and see the baby I held in my arms, dewing besotted, unable to believe that I'd created another human being. I see the toddler, reaching for my hand, the schoolboy weeping tears of fury after being bullied by some other child. I saw the vulnerabilities, the love, the history."

"Your face when you came back from diving that time told me everything; there is a hunger in you, Clark. A fearlessness. You just buried it, like most people do."

"Sometimes I felt as if we were all wading around in grief, reluctant to admit to others how far we were waving or drowning."

"She had the world's worst poker face: her feelings floated across them like reflections on a still pond."

"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."

"I had a hundred and seventeen days in which to convince Will Traynor that he had a reason to live."

"Sometimes for our sanity own sanity we just have to look at the bigger picture."

"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. Some deep-rooted part of you would know you were loved. That you deserved to be loved."

"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..."

"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."

"Love is the driver for all great stories: not just romantic love, but the love of parent for child, for family, for country."

"Only you, Will Traynor, could tell a woman how to wear a bloody dress."

"How could I explain to this girl what Will and I had been to each other,the way I felt that no person in the world had ever understood me like he did or ever would again?How could she understand that losing him was like having a hole shot straight through me, a painful, constant reminder, an absence I could never fill?"

"I'm not letting go of you."

"There is a whole lot more to life than winning."

"Be thrown into a new life (or at least thrown with sush force against the life of someone who is like squashed his face against the window) forces you to rethink who you are. Or what causes impression for others."