Top 120 Lisa Jewell Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I am brave, and I am brilliant, and I am strong...”

— Lisa Jewell

2. “May was like the Friday night of summer: all the good times lying ahead of you, bright and shiny and waiting to be lived.”

— Lisa Jewell

3. “This is the real world. We are real people. This is real life. And things sometimes happen that don’t fit in with how we think the story should go, but we just have to take a deep breath and get on with it, not sit there in the corner sulking because it’s not what we were hoping for.”

— Lisa Jewell

4. “If you loveach other, whatever happens you can deal with it, you can work it out. Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that it’s really not much fun having an adventure with someone you’re not in love with.”

— Lisa Jewell

5. “It’s the people who seem weak who are always suprisingly strong, and the ones who seem strong who are unexpectledly weak.”

— Lisa Jewell

6. “That’s always the way in life: the longer you leave things, the harder they are to do.”

— Lisa Jewell

7. “A man who can’t love but desperately needs to be loved is a dangerous thing indeed.”

— Lisa Jewell

8. “If destiny could bring two people together, then it could just as easily tear them apart, and, if it could tear two people apart, then it could just as easily bring them back together again. There was no beginning, middle and end to destiny. It wasn’t neat and manageable. It was random and scary.”

— Lisa Jewell

9. “When I read a book it feels like real life and when I put the book down it’s like I go back into the dream.”

— Lisa Jewell

10. “Friends can be a pain. They can be demanding and hard work. But maybe that’s because they’re the wrong friends. I read a quote once, can’t remember who by, but they said that your friends aren’t necessarily the people you like best, they’re just the people who got there first.”

— Lisa Jewell

11. “If she could rewind the timeline, untwist it and roll it back the other way like a ball of wool, she’d see the knots in the yarn, the warning signs. Looking at it backward it was obvious all along.”

— Lisa Jewell

12. “Cooking doesn’t just nurture the recipient, it nurtures the chef.”

— Lisa Jewell

13. “Stories,” she says, “are the only thing in this world that are real. Everything else is just a dream.”

— Lisa Jewell

14. “People try and make out there’s a greater purpose, a secret meaning, that it all means something. And it doesn’t.”

— Lisa Jewell

15. “I remember being twenty-one and thinking that my personality was a solid thing, that me was set in stone, that I would always feel what I felt and believe what I believed. But now I know that me is fluid and shape-changing.”

— Lisa Jewell

16. “Her daughter is dead and her mother is dead and her husband lives with a woman who is nicer than her in a hundred different ways. But she is OK.”

— Lisa Jewell

17. “You never really know a person until after they’re dead. That’s when it all comes out. All the stuff they locked up in boxes. All the secrets, all the lies. That’s when you really know the truth.”

— Lisa Jewell

18. “I will never guilt trip my children when they are adults, she’d vowed. I will never expect more than they are.”

— Lisa Jewell

19. “The human memory is such a cruel, frustrating thing, the way it just discards things without asking permission, precious things. At least here, in my house, I have control over my memories.”

— Lisa Jewell

20. “May was like the Friday night of summer:.”

— Lisa Jewell

21. “Moving on is something that happens to you, not something you do. That’s what people don’t realize. Moving on is not proactive. It’s organic. Be kind to yourself.”

— Lisa Jewell

22. “All men are weak,’ said Phin. ‘That’s the whole bloody trouble with the world. Too weak to love properly. Too weak to be wrong.”

— Lisa Jewell

23. “I’m not going to tell you that in ten years you’ll look back and wonder what the hell you were thinking, because I remember being twenty-one and thinking that my personality was a solid thing, that me was set in stone, that I would always feel what I felt and believe what I believed. But not I know that me is fluid and shape-changing.”

— Lisa Jewell

24. “She wondered if that was how it worked, that while most women spent their lives searching for the perfect man, men sat around waiting to be chosen and then made the best of it.”

— Lisa Jewell

25. “The concept of a troubled, lonely, middle-class, gay fifty-eight-year-old living alone in dusty squalor in a chocolate-box cottage in the heart of the Cotswolds was a hard one to grasp in the context of his sweaty, noisy, hectic, foreign, red-light existence.”

— Lisa Jewell

26. “But what do you do with an unattainable crush once it’s yours to keep? What does it become? Should there perhaps be a word to describe it? Because that’s the thing with getting what you want: all that yearning and dreaming and fantasizing leaves a great big hole that can only be filled with more yearning and dreaming and fantasizing.”

— Lisa Jewell

27. “She’d been acting the role of the scary woman for years because deep down inside she was scared. Scared of being alone. Scared that she’d had all her chances at happiness and blown each and every one of them.”

— Lisa Jewell

28. “Because deep down inside, she was scared. Scared of being alone, scared of being an outsider. Scared that she had all of her chances of happiness; and blown each and every one of them.”

— Lisa Jewell

29. “She slept all night with the bedroom window open even though she knows women are advised not to. She arranged glasses in a row along her windowsill so that if a man did break in at least she would have some warning.”

— Lisa Jewell

30. “All those hopes and dreams and talk of ballerinas and pop stars, concert pianists and boundary-breaking scientists. They all ended up in an office.”

— Lisa Jewell

31. “Same reason she didn’t tell you how hard she found it, being the spare part in your great dynasty. She obviously didn’t feel like she could talk to you.”

— Lisa Jewell

32. “But maybe I’ll end up doing something else unconventional. Who knows. And I really hope that if I do, and as long as I’m not hurting anyone or doing anything, like, illegal, that everyone would accept it, you know, just carry on loving me anyway.” Meg.”

— Lisa Jewell

33. “But when it is just me. Alone. With myself – there is no sunshine.”

— Lisa Jewell

34. “As the father of your children, as a friend, as someone who shared a journey with you and as someone who loves you and cares about you. I don’t need to be married to you to be all those things. Those things are deeper than marriage. Those things are for ever.”

— Lisa Jewell

35. “I know it sounds like it was all just a terrible disaster. Of course it does. Any situation involving four dead bodies is clearly far from ideal.”

— Lisa Jewell

36. “I know as well as you do that only the individual has the key to change themselves. It’s buried deep inside each and every one of us and although someone else can help us to find the key, we’re the only ones who can use it.”

— Lisa Jewell

37. “Like I might be about to do something really, really stupid. And knowing I’m going to do it isn’t going to stop it from happening.”

— Lisa Jewell

38. “They weren’t bad books,” Phin countered patiently. “They were books that you didn’t enjoy. It’s not the same thing at all. The only bad books are books that are so badly written that no one will publish them. Any book that has been published is going to be a ‘good book’ for someone.”

— Lisa Jewell

39. “And they are a part of you. And with Viva it sometimes felt like we were continuations of the same person, that I began where she ended, and vice versa.”

— Lisa Jewell

40. “They say that your powers of memory are at their peak when you’re 26, and it’s all downhill after that.”

— Lisa Jewell

41. “The only way to really know what was going on in the world was to listen to women talk. Anyone who ignores the chatter of women is poorer by any measure.”

— Lisa Jewell

42. “And how had she felt during those first few excruciatingly unfolding hours? What had filled her brain, her heart, to replace all those petty concerns? Terror. Despair. Grief. Horror. Agony. Turmoil. Heartbreak. Fear. All those words, all so melodramatic, yet all so insufficient.”

— Lisa Jewell

43. “Freedom came in strange forms and from unexpected directions.”

— Lisa Jewell

44. “I’m really sorry I can’t pay you back,” I said. He shook his head. “My father’s going to take everything you own and then break your life. It’s the least I can bloody do.”

— Lisa Jewell

45. “I remember his face when my father said that he no longer had private health cover, how quickly he left the house, how he dropped his unctuous demeanor like a brick. He sent him straight to the hospital in an NHS ambulance and left without saying goodbye.”

— Lisa Jewell

46. “When she left, she took with her any sense I had of myself as a worthwhile person. Without her I was just this blank space. When she died my whole world turned black.”

— Lisa Jewell

47. “His minute steak was tough and chewy, the chips were too greasy, and the ketchup wasn’t Heinz.”

— Lisa Jewell

48. “The human memory is such a cruel, frustrating thing, the way it just discards things without asking permission, precious things.”

— Lisa Jewell

49. “I’ve told her not to come here expecting validation or exemption from the usual rules of human decency.”

— Lisa Jewell

50. “She turns off her phone and she rests it on the kitchen counter and feels a wave of relief and weightlessness pass through her. She is unburdened of something she hadn’t even known she was carrying.”

— Lisa Jewell