Top 80 Beth O'Leary Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “How am I feeling? Untethered. Like something’s got dislodged somewhere in my chest and my body doesn’t function quite right any more. Like I’m alone.”

— Beth O'Leary

2. “Who’d have thought – you say something true enough times, you try hard enough, and maybe it sinks in.”

— Beth O'Leary

3. “Life is never simple.”

— Beth O'Leary

4. “Remind myself that there is no saving of people – people can only save themselves. The best you can do is help when they’re ready.”

— Beth O'Leary

5. “Being nice is a good thing. You can be strong and nice. You don’t have to be one or the other.”

— Beth O'Leary

6. “Humiliation is like mould: ignore it and the whole place will get smelly and green.”

— Beth O'Leary

7. “It can take people time to notice and process emotional abuse.”

— Beth O'Leary

8. “Gerty is a superb human being in the least obvious way.”

— Beth O'Leary

9. “It was never home until you were there, Tiffy.”

— Beth O'Leary

10. “The next thing I notice is the sheer quantity of crap in my living room... It’s like a terrible episode of Changing Rooms. Flat has been redecorated to look immeasurably worse. Can only conclude that she was doing it on purpose – nobody could be this tasteless accidentally.”

— Beth O'Leary

11. “The sudden rememberings are striking at entirely random times now, just bobbing up out of nowhere and sending me absolutely reeling.”

— Beth O'Leary

12. “Your brain can do amazing stuff to protect itself from pain,” Mo tells me. “But it’ll struggle to keep secrets from the rest of you for long.”

— Beth O'Leary

13. “I think you should know,′ he says. ‘I like you. Like I shouldn’t. That sort of like.”

— Beth O'Leary

14. “Holly couldn’t sleep; we played checkers. She lifts her fingers and dances them over the board like she’s weaving a magic spell before she touches a counter. Apparently it’s a mind game – makes the other player watch where you’re going instead of planning their next move. Where did a seven-year old learn mind games?”

— Beth O'Leary

15. “Often think it must be very tiring, being Tiffy. Even in note form she seems to expend so much energy.”

— Beth O'Leary

16. “Surprising how terrible it feels. Perhaps you never know how you feel about someone until they agree to marry someone else.”

— Beth O'Leary

17. “We’re so overdressed for a daytime event about crochet.”

— Beth O'Leary

18. “What is this, medieval times? I bet I’m better at punching people than Leon.”

— Beth O'Leary

19. “It was a weird way to get to know Leon, writing all these notes over the last few months, and it sort of happened without me noticing – one minute I was scribbling him a quick note about leftovers, the next I was in a full-on, day-to-day correspondence.”

— Beth O'Leary

20. “I wake with a jolt that sends a shock of pain through my ankle. Crying out, I look around me. Floral wallpaper. Am I at home? Who’s that man in the chair by the door, reading... “Twilight?” Leon blinks at me, putting the book down in his lap. ‘You went from unconscious to judgemental very quickly there.”

— Beth O'Leary

21. “How much did it hurt to come all this way knowing it was just to say goodbye?”

— Beth O'Leary

22. “Some people are beyond aromatherapeutic help.”

— Beth O'Leary

23. “People struggle to see it’s not about whether she’s going to die – palliative care isn’t just a place you go to slowly slip away. More people live and leave than die on our wards. It is about being comfortable for the duration of something necessary and painful. Making bad times easier.”

— Beth O'Leary

24. “My sexual frustration cannot be stopping you sleeping,” I say, conceding the point. “If that was possible, nobody would ever have been able to sleep in Victorian times.”

— Beth O'Leary

25. “I hand her the coffee. She gives it a sip, then nods in approval. I do a little fist pump, officially becoming a less odious human being than the man who wants to build a wall between Mexico and the US.”

— Beth O'Leary

26. “I’m just conveying the brutality of the market to you, Katherin,′ I say. That’s one of my favourite lines. Good old market, always there to be blamed. “The people don’t want history in their crochet books. They want cute pictures and easy instructions.”

— Beth O'Leary

27. “It’s easy to forget, when you’re missing someone, that they’re more than just the person you remember: they have sides to themselves they only show when other people are around.”

— Beth O'Leary

28. “Books are my happy place, he’d told her, and she’d felt herself light up, because that’s exactly what they are to her, too.”

— Beth O'Leary

29. “This flatshare. I wish I never done it. Wish I’d never opened up my life like that and let someone else walk in and fill it up. I was doing fine – safe, managing. Now my flat’s not mine, it’s ours, and when she’s gone all I will see is the absence of tiffin and books about bricklayers and that bloody stupid paisley beanbag. It’ll be another room full of what’s missing. Just what I didn’t want.”

— Beth O'Leary

30. “More silence, but it’s Mo-style silence, which means it is somehow incredibly reassuring. Like an audio hug. He doesn’t need words, Mo – his arts are beyond them.”

— Beth O'Leary

31. “That’s the messy thing about family tragedy, I guess. Your best support network goes under in an instant.”

— Beth O'Leary

32. “Love as a bargain. Like, giving up your heart is scary, but doable if the other person does it at the exact same moment, like two soldiers lowering their weapons.”

— Beth O'Leary

33. “Relationships like that stop being about ‘voluntarily’ very quickly. There’s lots of ways someone can make you stay with them, or think you want to.”

— Beth O'Leary

34. “As a rule, she prefers plants and cats to humans these days. They’re both species with a much better track record.”

— Beth O'Leary

35. “We don’t have any good words for talking about death – they’re all too small.”

— Beth O'Leary

36. “If I really thought I wasn’t good enough, I’d stop writing. Deep down, I love what I write and I think other people might too, one day.”

— Beth O'Leary

37. “It’s weird how easily you can get to know someone from the traces they leave behind when they go.”

— Beth O'Leary

38. “I’m rather worn out, and it’s an awful lot easier to be independent when there’s somebody else there with you.”

— Beth O'Leary

39. “Coldness growing low down in stomach. Heart rate up again, and for all the wrong reasons this time. I’m getting angry. That feeling again, the trapped hateful rage at hearing someone you try so hard to love saying the worst things.”

— Beth O'Leary

40. “The pain of missing her is scorching, but I’ll live through it.”

— Beth O'Leary

41. “She smiles up at me and I feel something shift in my chest. Hard to describe. Maybe like a lock clicking into place.”

— Beth O'Leary

42. “But that’s the thing about almost: you can be ninety-nine per cent there, you can be an inch away from doing it, but if you stop yourself from stepping over that line, nobody will ever know how close you were.”

— Beth O'Leary

43. “Darling, have you no shame? Cherry had said, What’s shame good for, except keeping people down?”

— Beth O'Leary

44. “It all seems too good, like we can’t possibly deserve it, like we’re taking too much happiness and not leaving enough for everyone.”

— Beth O'Leary

45. “Every day is a good day, if you look hard enough.”

— Beth O'Leary

46. “You were healing. You’re still healing. You’ll maybe always be healing. And that’s OK. It’ll just be part of what makes you you.”

— Beth O'Leary

47. “Have you ever looked forward to reading a book so much you can’t actually start it?”

— Beth O'Leary

48. “Is it really an adventure if you don’t make at least one ill-advised decision?”

— Beth O'Leary

49. “What’s shame good for, except keeping people down?”

— Beth O'Leary

50. “Perhaps I am not so hard to like, Jane thinks fiercely as she meets Aggie’s eyes. Perhaps I am not so peculiar, so awkward, so difficult. Perhaps he was wrong about all that, too. “Good, eh?” Aggie says. “Yes,” Jane says, and she smiles. To her immense surprise, she’s happy. It’s one of those feelings, happiness. One of the ones you don’t really notice is gone until it comes back.”

— Beth O'Leary