Top 400 Jojo Moyes Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “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

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

— Jojo Moyes

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

— Jojo Moyes

254. “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

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

— Jojo Moyes

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

— Jojo Moyes

257. “The difference between growing up like me and growing up like Will was that he wore his sense of entitlement lightly. I think if you grow up as he had done, with wealthy parents, in a nice house, if you go to good schools and nice restaurants as a matter of course, you probably just have this sense that good things will fall into place, that your position in the world is naturally an elevated one.”

— Jojo Moyes

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

— Jojo Moyes

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

— Jojo Moyes

260. “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

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

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

— Jojo Moyes

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

— Jojo Moyes

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

— Jojo Moyes

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

— Jojo Moyes

267. “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

268. “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

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

— Jojo Moyes

270. “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

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

— Jojo Moyes

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

— Jojo Moyes

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

— Jojo Moyes

274. “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

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

— Jojo Moyes

276. “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

277. “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

278. “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

279. “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

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

— Jojo Moyes

281. “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

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

— Jojo Moyes

283. “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

284. “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

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

— Jojo Moyes

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

— Jojo Moyes

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

— Jojo Moyes

288. “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

289. “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

290. “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

291. “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

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. “We see what we want to see, after all, especially when blinded by physical attraction.”

— Jojo Moyes

294. “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

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

— Jojo Moyes

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

— Jojo Moyes

297. “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

298. “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

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

— Jojo Moyes

300. “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