Top 80 Beth O'Leary Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Have you ever looked forward to reading a book so much you can’t actually start it?”

— Beth O'Leary

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

— Beth O'Leary

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

— Beth O'Leary

54. “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

55. “There’s lots of ways someone can make you stay with them, or think you want to.”

— Beth O'Leary

56. “I think part of what had made me so angry with my mum was the fact that I felt she should have been looking after me, not the other way around. But Mum couldn’t be my shoulder to cry on, not when she was bent double with grief herself. That’s the messy thing about family tragedy, I guess. Your best support network goes under in an instant.”

— Beth O'Leary

57. “When I kissed him on the cheek I’d planned to make our first proper kiss soft and slow, the kind of kiss you feel in your toes, but when I actually get there it’s clear there’s been way too much waiting and sexy rocky-road-eating for that. This is a proper kiss, the kind that promises very imminent undressing, the kind that generally happens while in the process of stumbling toward a bed.”

— Beth O'Leary

58. “I was trying so hard. All the time dredging up the worst memories, the endless conversations with Mo, the counselling. I was trying. But I guess Leon thought I was too broken to fix myself.”

— Beth O'Leary

59. “Family can be so complicated, but if you just pick your own way of doing it you can end up with something pretty perfect all the same.”

— Beth O'Leary

60. “Do you know what an achievement it is to turn out that way growing up in your house?” Marcus says to my father, straightening up. He meets my dad’s gaze like it’s no effort at all, like he isn’t even frightened. “Do you know what it takes to be a good man when someone’s always told you you’re not good enough?”

— Beth O'Leary

61. “Maybe you spent a lot of time being told you couldn’t manage without him,’ Mo says gently. ‘That would explain why you want him back, even when you don’t want him.”

— Beth O'Leary

62. “If you’re holding someone close enough, you can be the shoulder and the crier.”

— Beth O'Leary

63. “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

64. “I start tidying my Gilmore Girls DVDs into the correct order, too jittery to stand still.”

— Beth O'Leary

65. “Back when I was with Justin, if I was going out clubbing with Rachel he would always remind me that lots of men see ‘quirky girl’ and think ‘desperate and easy’. He’s right, as per usual. I actually wonder if it’s easier to get laid as a quirky girl than a perky cheerleader type: you’re more approachable, and nobody assumes you’ve already got a boyfriend.”

— Beth O'Leary

66. “Everyone’s got the potential to do the wrong thing – if we were measured that way, we’d all come up short. It’s about what you do.”

— Beth O'Leary

67. “Never been one for worst-case scenarios,” Jackson says. He crouches to dip his roller in the tray; his wrists are flecked with paint now, new, brighter freckles. “When they happen, you cope. And it’s usually one you’ve not thought of that gets you, so why worry?”

— Beth O'Leary

68. “You do waste an awful lot of time when you’re young.”

— Beth O'Leary

69. “I’ve just validated all your stuff about how people always let you down, haven’t I? You’re not mad because you’re not even surprised.”

— Beth O'Leary

70. “I keep pressing Esc but I’m still here.”

— Beth O'Leary

71. “I’m a teacher... no millions at stake, just futures.”

— Beth O'Leary

72. “The person on the other side is the sort of elderly lady who turns out to be an alien in a Doctor Who episode. Just way too perfectly old-lady-ish.”

— Beth O'Leary

73. “That’s the difference between a friend and a lover, Jane. A friend doesn’t need the whole of you. If you don’t want to tell me about your life before we met, I don’t give a toss – I’m in it for the Jane that’s here and now, aren’t I? I take you as you come. But if I loved you, I’d want everything. Wouldn’t I? Don’t you want all of him? All his secrets? All the versions of Joseph that exist out there, all the people he is when he’s at work and with his mother and with the lads at the pub?”

— Beth O'Leary

74. “He’s not looking at me like he’s never seen me before. He’s looking at me like he’s never seen anyone else.”

— Beth O'Leary

75. “If one could harness secrets for energy, we wouldn’t need petrol. We’d have enough grudges in this car to take us all the way to Scotland.”

— Beth O'Leary

76. “That’s the way with old friends. You understand each other, even when there’s not enough words out there for everything that should be said.”

— Beth O'Leary

77. “Sometimes it feels easier to just be the way I was before you. Safer. But... look what you’ve been able to do. How brave you’ve been. And that’s how I want to be.”

— Beth O'Leary

78. “To be true to yourself, you have to have a sense of self to work with.”

— Beth O'Leary

79. “I love summer,” she says idly, “but I prefer spring. All that hope, everything waiting to come to life.”

— Beth O'Leary

80. “Can you text back and tell him that comments like that are the reason womankind cares so much about their measurements? And that by declaring that “most girls would hate that”, he is perpetuating the female body image problem, and setting women up against one another, which is one of the greatest problems feminism faces to this day?”

— Beth O'Leary

81. “I stop dead in my tracks again; this time a businessman on a scooter runs over my foot.”

— Beth O'Leary

82. “It’s like – it’s like saying she’s really gone, and I don’t want to say it, Miranda, I don’t want to let her go, because I said I never would, I said I’d never leave her, and she was so afraid I would and I don’t want to. I can’t. I can’t let her go.”

— Beth O'Leary

83. “Perhaps the lady is losing her marbles a little. It’s started happening to Penelope – terribly sad, though on the plus side she seems to have forgotten that she can’t stand Roland. It’s been something of a second honeymoon for the two of them.”

— Beth O'Leary