“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.”

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.

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 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.

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.

Do you know how hard it is to say nothing? When every atom of you strains to do the opposite?

Much to my own surprise, I got through it. And life…well, gradually became livable again.

Know that you hold my heart, my hopes, in your hands.

​​​​​​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.

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.

Knowing you still have possibilities is a luxury. Knowing I might have given them to you has alleviated something for me.

I had practiced not saying anything the whole way from the airport, and it was still nearly killing me.

Is that it forces you to rethink your idea of who you are. Or how you might seem to other people.

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

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 could hear her babbling away beside me, but I wasn’t really paying attention. I could barely focus on anything.

But just as nature abhors a vacuum — so does the human heart.

Madame Curie didn’t stumble upon radium by accident. She searched and experimented and sweated and suffered years before she found it. Success rarely is an accident.

We have found a direct correlation between grit and positive emotions, but the fact that I have no evidence that grit is bad for you doesn’t mean it’s not. It’s always a possibility that in the future researchers will discover a downside to grit.

Do I believe in arbitration? I do. But not in arbitration between the lion and the lamb, in which the lamb is in the morning found inside the lion

Truth is a gem that is found at a great depth; whilst on the surface of the world all things are weighed by the false scale of custom.

it would generally be found that he had suffered more from the apprehension of such evils as never happened to him than from those evils which had really befallen him.

There are worse things than a lie… I have found… that it may be well to choose one sin in order that another may be shunned.

I once tried standing up on my toes to see far out in the distance, but I found that I could see much farther by climbing to a high place.

Genius is more often found in a cracked pot than in a whole one.