Top 400 Jojo Moyes Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “It was a terrible thing to discover you no longer wanted the life that stretched out ahead of you.”

— Jojo Moyes

252. “I learned a long time ago, Ellie, that ‘if only’ is a very dangerous game indeed.”

— Jojo Moyes

253. “Around me a million people are living, breathing, eating, arguing. A million lives completely divorced from mine. It is a strange sort of peace.”

— Jojo Moyes

254. “All babies look like currant buns to me.”

— Jojo Moyes

255. “Convinced that if she wished hard enough, good things would finally happen.”

— Jojo Moyes

256. “And yet. To commit to Sam was to commit to the likelihood of more loss.”

— Jojo Moyes

257. “Nobody ever feels they’re doing well with teenagers, he said. I think that’s kind of the point of them.”

— Jojo Moyes

258. “Agnes’s expression was briefly wistful. Then she shrugged. “But on the bright side, they are quite old. Maybe some of them will die soon.”

— Jojo Moyes

259. “And when it came down to it, what was the point in re-examining your sadness all the time anyway?”

— Jojo Moyes

260. “Heartbreak was a luxury too costly for the single parent.”

— Jojo Moyes

261. “With Will I had never had to consider what I said; talking to him was as effortless as breathing. Now I was good at not really saying anything about myself at all.”

— Jojo Moyes

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

— Jojo Moyes

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

— Jojo Moyes

264. “But then I knew better than anyone how the persona you chose to present to the world could be very different from what was really inside. I knew how grief could make you behave in ways you couldn’t even begin to understand.”

— Jojo Moyes

265. “Sometimes, she told herself, life was a series of obstacles that just had to be negotiated, possibly through sheer act of will. She stared out at the muddy blue of the endless sea, gulped in the air, lifted her chin, and decided that she could survive this. She could survive most things. It was nobody’s right to be happy, after all.”

— Jojo Moyes

266. “Everyone I knew hated Monday mornings, but I never minded them.”

— Jojo Moyes

267. “A certain kind of man looked at God’s own land, she thought, as she drew closer, and instead of beauty and wonder, all he saw was dollar signs.”

— Jojo Moyes

268. “My skin grew freckled, my nails bleached, and I began to feel a rare happiness at the simple pleasures of existing here – of walking on a beach, eating unfamiliar foods, swimming in warm, clear water where black fish gazed shyly from under volcanic rocks, or watching the sun sink fiery red into the horizon.”

— Jojo Moyes

269. “There was only so much news you could digest in one day.”

— Jojo Moyes

270. “There was still beauty in this world, even if some days it took every bit of strength and obstinacy to find it.”

— Jojo Moyes

271. “I don’t know what I think. All I know is that most of the time, I would rather be with him that anyone else I know.”

— Jojo Moyes

272. “I thought how lucky you might be to find not one but two extraordinary men to love – and what a fluke it was if they happened to love you back.”

— Jojo Moyes

273. “You shut down a library Louisa, you don’t just shut down a building, you shut down hope.”

— Jojo Moyes

274. “But surely if you loved someone it was your job to stick with him? To help him through the depression? In sickness and in health, and all that?”

— Jojo Moyes

275. “Margaret laughed. “Sure thing. Sorry, Ave. I’ll go and get the tea.” Ave. If Avice had been feeling less awful, she would have corrected her: there was nothing worse than an abbreviated name.”

— Jojo Moyes

276. “I don’t think he’ll be able to see you over the radio,” Frances ventured. “But I still want to look nice for him.” Margaret.”

— Jojo Moyes

277. “The hardest thing about talking to teenagers, I had discovered, was that whatever you said inevitably came across like something an elderly aunt would say at a wedding.”

— Jojo Moyes

278. “All the stuff that was important or interesting about me was what I couldn’t share.”

— Jojo Moyes

279. “More my son, I found myself thinking. You were never really there for him. Not emotionally. You were just the absence he was always striving to impress.”

— Jojo Moyes

280. “Had he actually possessed the ability simply to airbrush an entire daughter out of his conscience?”

— Jojo Moyes

281. “She’d read somewhere that you only truly saw what someone looked like in the first few minutes of meeting them, that after then it was only an impression, colored by what you thought of them.”

— Jojo Moyes

282. “It’s quite hard to stay calm and understanding when you see the same faces, the same mistakes made again and again.”

— Jojo Moyes

283. “What are you saying?” He fought to keep his voice under control. “You love me but there’s no hope for us?”

— Jojo Moyes

284. “How could I convey the way those short months had changed the way I felt about everything? The way he had skewed my world so totally that is made no sense without him.”

— Jojo Moyes

285. “If he has love, he will feel he can go on. Without it, I would have sunk many times over.”

— Jojo Moyes

286. “It was an odd sensation, having to view my family as human beings.”

— Jojo Moyes

287. “This is where any sensible person pulls together the remnants of their self-respect, announces that they deserve more, and walks off to find someone who can give them a whole self, not snatched lunchtimes and haunted, empty evenings.”

— Jojo Moyes

288. “You could only truly reinvent yourself far from home. On trips to see her parents, she still feels a little stifled by all that communal history.”

— Jojo Moyes

289. “I tried to show him that he was the answer to a question I hadn’t even known I had been asking.”

— Jojo Moyes

290. “Then he told her, in the quiet tones of someone offloading a confession, that she was the most mazing women he had ever met. And when she lifted her swollen eyes to his, Ed mopped her bleeding nose, and he dropped his lips gently onto hers, and he did what he had wanted to do for the past forty-eight hours, even if he had been initially too dumb to know it, He kissed her.”

— Jojo Moyes

291. “I’ve had a very good life, Louisa. I loved my job and I worked with some wonderful people. I traveled to Paris, Milan, Berlin, London, far more than most women my age... I had my beautiful apartment and some excellent friends. You mustn’t worry about me. All this nonsense about women having it all. We never could and we never shall. Women always have to make difficult choices. But there is a great consolation in simply doing something you love.”

— Jojo Moyes

292. “I had put on a bright yellow T-shirt in the hope that it would make me look happier than I felt.”

— Jojo Moyes

293. “It had been years before she could view anybody else’s happiness without mourning the loss of her own.”

— Jojo Moyes

294. “She gave me another hard look, the kind that can only travel from mother to daughter.”

— Jojo Moyes

295. “Who says you failed?” Dad stroked her hair back from her face. His expression was tender. “I’m just thinking of what I know about Will Traynor, what I know about men like him. And I’ll say one thing to you. I’m not sure anyone in the world was ever going to persuade that man once he’d set his mind to something. He’s who he is. You can’t make people change who they are.”

— Jojo Moyes

296. “That’s the thing you don’t know about children unless you have them – bath time, Lego, and fish fingers don’t allow you to dwell on tragedy for too long.”

— Jojo Moyes

297. “They called each other “baby” so often that I occasionally wondered if they had forgotten each other’s names.”

— Jojo Moyes

298. “I looked at Will and I saw the baby I held in my arms, dewily besotted, unable to believe that I had created another human being. I saw 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. That’s what he was asking me to extinguish – the small child as well as the man – all that love, all that history.”

— Jojo Moyes

299. “You know what makes me feel down? The way you keep promising to live some kind of a life, then sacrifice yourself to every waif and stray who comes across your path.”

— Jojo Moyes

300. “But, like too many girls, life had chipped away at her until, instead of finding what truly suited her, she camouflaged herself, hid the bits that made her different. For a while she let the world bruise her until she decided it was safer not to be herself at all. There are so many versions of ourselves we can choose to be.”

— Jojo Moyes