Top 80 Beth O'Leary Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “There’s lots of ways someone can make you stay with them, or think you want to.”

— Beth O'Leary

52. “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

53. “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

54. “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

55. “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

56. “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

57. “That sort of kindness, it gets into your bones. Once you’ve felt it, you can’t help but look for ways to pass the feeling on.”

— Beth O'Leary

58. “Terry’s the “fun guy” of the boys you’d see at a pub quiz machine. The one who never gets laid but talks like he’s screwed every girl in the bar. That guy, but twenty years on. Still “fun,” still not getting any.”

— Beth O'Leary

59. “He’s where my mind goes when I’m feeling my best.”

— Beth O'Leary

60. “Settle what down? What is there that needs settling? I know who I am and what I want. I don’t need some guy to make me complete, or whatever it is they’re meant to do.”

— Beth O'Leary

61. “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

62. “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

63. “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

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

— Beth O'Leary

65. “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

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

— Beth O'Leary

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

— Beth O'Leary

68. “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

69. “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

70. “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

71. “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

72. “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

73. “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

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

— Beth O'Leary

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

— Beth O'Leary

76. “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

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

— Beth O'Leary

78. “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

79. “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

80. “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

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

— Beth O'Leary

82. “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

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

— Beth O'Leary