Top 400 Jojo Moyes Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “There was still beauty in this world, even if some days it took every bit of strength and obstinacy to find it.”

— Jojo Moyes

252. “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

253. “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

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

— Jojo Moyes

255. “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

256. “He talked to her in the way that people tell lifelong secrets to fellow passengers in railway carriages.”

— Jojo Moyes

257. “I often ordered chips, just so that I could watch them all pretend they didn’t want one.”

— Jojo Moyes

258. “Tanzie knew Nicky was thinking what she was thinking – that Mum had finally gone mad. But she had read somewhere that mad people were like sleepwalkers – it was best not to disturb them. So she nodded really slowly, like this was all making good sense.”

— Jojo Moyes

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

— Jojo Moyes

260. “The worst thing about working as a caregiver is not what you might think. IT’s not the lifting and cleaning, the medicines and wipes, and the distant but somehow always perceptible smell of disinfectant. IT’s not even the fact that most people assume you’re only doing it because you really aren’t smart enough to do anything else. It’s the fact that when you spend all day in proximity to someone, there is no escape from their moods. Or your own.”

— Jojo Moyes

261. “So this is it. You are scored on my heart, Clark.”

— Jojo Moyes

262. “I’m not saying she wasn’t wrong to do it. I’m just saying maybe that one moment shouldn’t be the whole thing that defines her. Or your relationship with her.”

— Jojo Moyes

263. “Her life these days held a constant underlying drumbeat of worry.”

— Jojo Moyes

264. “On evenings like this, when the streets below were filled with couples strolling, and laughing people spilled out of pubs, already planning meals, nights out, trips to clubs, something ached inside me, something primal telling me that I was in the wrong place, that I was missing something. These were the moments when I felt most left behind.”

— Jojo Moyes

265. “I rang my parents and told them that I would stay over. My mother sounded relieved. When I told her I was going to get paid for sleeping over, she sounded overjoyed. “Did you hear that, Bernard?” she said, her hand half over the phone. “They’re paying her to sleep now.” I could hear my father’s exclamation. “Praise the Lord. She’s found her dream career.”

— Jojo Moyes

266. “With that kiss, I tried to tell him the enormity of what he meant to me. I tried to show him that he was the answer to a question I hadn’t even known I had been asking. I tried to thank him for wanting me to be me, more than he wanted to make me stay.”

— Jojo Moyes

267. “I don’t want my happiness to be entirely dependent on somebody else’s, to be a hostage to fortunes I cannot control.”

— Jojo Moyes

268. “I wanted to live as Edouard did, joyfully, sucking the marrow out of every moment and singing because it tasted so good.”

— Jojo Moyes

269. “I could only have done the thing that I did, but also that this will help you live a really good life, a better life, than if you hadn’t met me.”

— Jojo Moyes

270. “Please. Come on. Right here, on the bed. Right next to me.”

— Jojo Moyes

271. “It was as if a light had gone on: the only way to avoid being left behind was to start moving.”

— Jojo Moyes

272. “It was a terrible thing to discover you no longer wanted the life that stretched out ahead of you.”

— Jojo Moyes

273. “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

274. “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

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

— Jojo Moyes

276. “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

277. “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

278. “Course, you know that only happens till you learn to hit back harder.”

— Jojo Moyes

279. “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

280. “Across Manhattan the sun glowed orange, the endless sea of glittering skyscrapers reflecting back a peach light, the centre of the world, going about its business. A million lives below me, a million heartbreaks big and small, tales of joy and loss and survival, a million little victories every day.”

— Jojo Moyes

281. “She went kind of pink and laughed, the kind of laugh you do when you know yo shouldn’t be laughing. The kind of laugh that spoke of a conspiracy.”

— Jojo Moyes

282. “Will and I had been to each other, the way I felt that no person in the world had ever understood me like he did or ever would again.”

— Jojo Moyes

283. “I had never had to consider what I said; talking to him was as effortless as breathing.”

— Jojo Moyes

284. “He had a dozen arguments with her before breakfast, and a thousand passionate reconciliations before he went to sleep.”

— Jojo Moyes

285. “I kissed him and let my lips rest against his so that our breath mingled and the tears from my eyes became salt on his skin, and I told myself that, somewhere, tiny particles of him would become tiny particles of me, ingested, swallowed, alive, perpetual.”

— Jojo Moyes

286. “Not everything is black and white. Much as we would like it to be.”

— Jojo Moyes

287. “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

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

— Jojo Moyes

289. “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

290. “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

291. “Nothing more dangerous than a woman armed with a little knowledge.”

— Jojo Moyes

292. “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

293. “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

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

— Jojo Moyes

295. “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

296. “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

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

— Jojo Moyes

298. “He dropped his head and kissed her. He kisses her and it was a kiss of utter certainty, the kind of kiss during which monarchs die and whole continents fall without your even noticing.”

— Jojo Moyes

299. “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

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

— Jojo Moyes