Top 400 Jojo Moyes Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “She gave me another hard look, the kind that can only travel from mother to daughter.”

— Jojo Moyes

302. “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

303. “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

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

— Jojo Moyes

305. “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

306. “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

307. “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

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

— Jojo Moyes

309. “Up in this high air you breathed easily, drawing in a vital assurance and lightness of heart. In the highlands you woke up in the morning and.”

— Jojo Moyes

310. “If you’d bothered to ask me, Clark, if you’d bothered to consult me just once about this so-called fun outing of ours, I could have told you. I hate horses, and horse racing. Always have. But you didn’t bother to ask me. You decided what you thought you’d like me to do, and you went ahead and did it. You did what everyone else does. You decided for me.”

— Jojo Moyes

311. “And I ordered the cheesecake.”

— Jojo Moyes

312. “And when it came down to it, what was the point in re-examining your sadness all the time anyway? It was like picking at a wound and refusing to let it heal. I knew what I had been part of. I knew what my role was. What was the point in going over and over it?”

— Jojo Moyes

313. “I had a vague memory of the intensity of teenage female relationships; more of a passion than a normal friendship.”

— Jojo Moyes

314. “We had thought it a little odd, but what did we know? Lou has been peculiar since birth, after all. Mum.”

— Jojo Moyes

315. “She doesn’t know what to say. She feels quietly furious with him, while conscious that she has no right to be. What has he ever promised her, after all?”

— Jojo Moyes

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

— Jojo Moyes

317. “She has several imaginary conversations with him and two imaginary arguments.”

— Jojo Moyes

318. “He had blown in with the soft breezes of a wider world, and it was weirdly seductive.”

— Jojo Moyes

319. “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

320. “I never really cared what anyone thought of me until he came along, ” she said. “And now, I can’t believe it’s me he’s chosen. Every morning I wake up and thank God that he did. Every night I go to bed praying that time will go that much faster so that I can be with him again. I think all the time about what he’s doing, who he’s talking to. Not in a jealous way, or anything. I just want to be closer to him, and if I can imagine what he’s doing, then that helps.”

— Jojo Moyes

321. “We danced as if we had nothing else to do but dance. Lord, it felt good. I had forgotten the joy of just existing, of losing yourself in the music... I let go of everything, my problems floating away like helium balloons: my awful job, my picky boss, my failure to move on. I became a thing, alive, moving, joyful.”

— Jojo Moyes

322. “What am I meant to do with what’s left?”

— Jojo Moyes

323. “I hadn’t thought that as well as the obvious fears about money, and your future, losing your job would make you feel inadequate, and a bit useless. That it would be harder to get up in the morning then when you were rudely shocked into consciousness by the alarm. That you might miss the people you worked with, no matter how little you had in common with them. Or even that you might find yourself searching for familiar faces as you walked the high street.”

— Jojo Moyes

324. “I remembered Agnes’s words: that we who traveled far from home would always have our hearts in two places. I placed my hand on the candlewick bedspread. And, finally, I wept.”

— Jojo Moyes

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

— Jojo Moyes

326. “Here’s the thing about middle-class people. They pretend not to look, but they do. They’re too polite to actually stare. Instead, they do this weird thing of catching sight of Will in their field of vision and then determinedly not looking at him. Until he’s gone past, at which point their gaze flickers toward him, even while they remain in conversation with someone else. They won’t talk about him, though. Because that would be rude.”

— Jojo Moyes

327. “I know the subtlest movements of the city because I no longer sleep.”

— Jojo Moyes

328. “Books are what teach you about life. Books teach you empathy. But you can’t buy books if you barely got enough to make rent. So that library is a vital resource! You shut a library, Louisa, you don’t just shut down a building, you shut down hope.”

— Jojo Moyes

329. “He will be out there, living his life to the full, when she seems to have put hers perennially on hold.”

— Jojo Moyes

330. “I thought about the fact that there seemed to be such a high cost to anything a woman chose to do with her life, unless she simply aimed low. But I knew that already, didn’t I? I had come here and it had cost me dear.”

— Jojo Moyes

331. “The men were less interesting to look at, but nearly all had that air about them that I could sometimes detect in Will – of wealth and entitlement, a sense that life would settle itself agreeably around them.”

— Jojo Moyes

332. “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

333. “Pengetahuan adalah Senjata.”

— Jojo Moyes

334. “Why do you think nobody writes love letters like these anymore?” she says instead, pulling one from her bag. “I mean, yes, there are texts and e-mails and things, but nobody sends them in language like this, do they? Nobody spells it out anymore like our unknown lover did.”

— Jojo Moyes

335. “She cried like someone heartbroken.”

— Jojo Moyes

336. “It seemed unfair that despite the fact he could not use them, or feel them, his extremities should cause him so much discomfort.”

— Jojo Moyes

337. “I felt the mood shift. And, for no reason at all other than that he didn’t expect it, I climbed fully clothed into the bath and kissed him as he laughed and spluttered. I was suddenly glad of his solidity in a world where it was so easy to fall.”

— Jojo Moyes

338. “He kissed her, and knew he was trying to tell her the depth of how he felt. Even as he lost himself in her, felt her hair sweep across his face, his chest, her lips meet his skin, her fingers, he understood that there were people for whom one other was their missing part.”

— Jojo Moyes

339. “I wondered if she knew that everything she said made the other person feel like an idiot. I wondered if it was something she’d actually cultivated deliberately. I didn’t think I could ever manage to make someone feel inferior.”

— Jojo Moyes

340. “She was always tired, these days. She put on one of those smiles that wasn’t really a smile at all, and they went on.”

— Jojo Moyes

341. “And I kissed him until reason seeped out through my pores and I became a living pulse, conscious only of what I wanted to do to him.”

— Jojo Moyes

342. “Beside me Sam had started to shake silently. “Stop them,” he murmured. “I’m going to bust my stitches.”

— Jojo Moyes

343. “He smelled of warm, sleepy male. She had forgotten what a weirdly potent scent that was.”

— Jojo Moyes

344. “It’s like he’s determined not to see the good in anything.”

— Jojo Moyes

345. “He could be happy, if surrounded by the right people, if allowed to be Will, instead of The Man in the Wheelchair, the list of symptoms, the object of pity. And.”

— Jojo Moyes

346. “I don’t know. Maybe I just believe in second chances.”

— Jojo Moyes

347. “If someone wanted to be with you, after all, they just made it happen.”

— Jojo Moyes

348. “You had to seize the day. You had to embrace opportunities as they came. You had to be the kind of person who said yes.”

— Jojo Moyes

349. “I ache, I rattle with supplements, and my grandchildren cannot believe I have ever been anything but prehistoric.”

— Jojo Moyes

350. “I turned away, unexpectedly afraid to look at him. I was afraid of what he might be feeling, the depth of his loss, the extent of his fears. Will Traynor’s life had been so far beyond the experiences of mine. Who was I to tell him how he should want to live it?”

— Jojo Moyes