Top 120 Lisa Jewell Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “The journey back through the house, like all return journeys, felt shorter and less convoluted; the sense of knowing how long the tunnels were and where they ended up was reassuring.”

— Lisa Jewell

52. “Like any challenge in life, once the mind was focused on the job in question, it became a simple matter of getting on with it, inch by inch, step by step.”

— Lisa Jewell

53. “You knew I would, didn’t you?’ She smiles sadly. ‘Oh, I don’t know, I suppose it occurred to me. I would have said something. Soon. I was on the verge. It just didn’t seem like first-date kind of fodder.’ ‘No,’ he says softly. ‘I get that.’ She turns the mug round and round, not sure where to head next with this development.”

— Lisa Jewell

54. “She felt like a creature born to reside on the bottom of the ocean floor, dark and flat and half-blind, slowly rising through the icy water to the glittering light above.”

— Lisa Jewell

55. “Did you know that the parts of the brain involved in decision-making aren’t fully developed until you’re twenty-five years old?”

— Lisa Jewell

56. “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

57. “But nothing was often everything in forensics. Nothing could often be the answer to the whole bloody thing.”

— Lisa Jewell

58. “But until you’ve experienced the incredible mix of emotions that a sibling brings to your life it’s really very hard to imagine. The love and the hate, the fun and the fights, the rivalry and the kinship. No one else knows your world like a sibling does. They’re there, every crap summer holiday, every day off school, every time your parents argue, every boring Christmas Day, every birthday party, they’re there. And they are a part of you.”

— Lisa Jewell

59. “But she has five years to find Him and marry him and then another five years to have a baby, maybe two if she likes the first one. She’s not in a rush. Not yet. She’ll just keep swinging left, keep looking nice when she goes out, keep accepting invitations to social events, keep positive, keep slim, keep herself together, keep going.”

— Lisa Jewell

60. “I know I keep coming here and telling you that I’m growing up, but before I used to think that being grown up meant doing grown-up things. Now I know that’s not true, that being a grown-up is not about getting married, about smart flats and reading groups; it’s about taking responsibility for your own actions and the consequences of those actions.”

— Lisa Jewell

61. “Her mother existed entirely in the moment. And she made every moment sparkle.”

— Lisa Jewell

62. “Listen, Dad, in a family like this, the wife without a child is at the bottom of the heap. Everyone comes before them. Everyone.”

— Lisa Jewell

63. “We’re all different.”

— Lisa Jewell

64. “If, quite against all of Adele’s naturally held beliefs, it turned out that there was an afterlife, she strongly suspected that in heaven it would always be a Friday night.”

— Lisa Jewell

65. “You have anxiety?” “No. But I told them I did and they said I could bring my dog.”

— Lisa Jewell

66. “She didn’t need ‘little chunks of home’. They were like slightly sinister postcards from old enemies.”

— Lisa Jewell

67. “Poppy is wearing a loose-fitting dress made of blue and white striped cotton, with navy woolen tights and a pair of navy leather pumps. Her brown hair is tied back and has two small red clips in it. It’s a very formal outfit for a young girl, Laurel feels. The sort of thing she’d have had to bribe both her girls to wear when they were that age.”

— Lisa Jewell

68. “And you will always be so much more than a label.”

— Lisa Jewell

69. “Memories fluttered about her mind, of days that had passed and died and were never to return.”

— Lisa Jewell

70. “Babies did that to you: they pinned you down in the moment at precisely the same time as hurtling you into the future and hitching you back to the past.”

— Lisa Jewell

71. “But here was his lovely dad who did not understand what Rory had.”

— Lisa Jewell

72. “You will stay, won’t you? I have, as ever, royally overcatered.”

— Lisa Jewell

73. “Adele was struck by how often women undervalued their own efforts while being endlessly impressed by those of their peers.”

— Lisa Jewell

74. “Do you love him?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Do you love him enough to hurt a lot of people who don’t deserve to be hurt?’ ‘How do you expect me to answer that?’ ‘It’s a tough question, but you do need to answer it. Not now, but over the next hours and days.”

— Lisa Jewell

75. “I’m talking about kids, Mrs. H. Terrible, dreadful, blasted awful kids. They’ve all got a darkness inside them. They’ve all got the capacity for evil. Give them free range over a piece of territory, like that out there, and you’ve got Lord of the Flies. You cannot afford to take your eye off the ball for a second. Not for even a second...”

— Lisa Jewell

76. “But what you just said, about him being dangerous. What do you mean by that?” “I mean,” says Blue, “that a man who can’t love but desperately needs to be loved is a dangerous thing indeed. And I think Floyd is dangerous because he’s pretending to be someone he’s not in order to get you to love him.”

— Lisa Jewell

77. “That was how she’d once viewed her perfect life: as a series of bad smells and unfulfilled duties, petty worries and late bills.”

— Lisa Jewell

78. “Other mothers lose children without losing their husbands, too.” “You didn’t lose me, Laurel. I’m still yours. I’ll always be yours.” “Well, that’s not strictly true, is it?” He sighs again. “Where it counts,” he says. “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 forever.”

— Lisa Jewell

79. “People are easier to deal with if they underestimate you.”

— Lisa Jewell

80. “I will see you next week, Mum. And if I don’t, then I want you to know that you have been the best and most amazing mother in the world and I have been extraordinarily lucky to have you for so long. And that I adore you. And that we all do. And that you could not have been any better than you were. OK?”

— Lisa Jewell

81. “I thought of what I’d allowed myself to become, for you. I never wanted that bloody child. I only wanted you.”

— Lisa Jewell

82. “Rejection was a fact of life. It wasn’t a nice fact of life. But it was a fact.”

— Lisa Jewell

83. “Never marry a woman. They might look good, but they destroy you.”

— Lisa Jewell

84. “I’d been secretly fantasising about you waking up fully restored back to factory settings.”

— Lisa Jewell

85. “That’s one thing I’ve learned. If you’re with the right people then you’re generally in the right place.”

— Lisa Jewell

86. “She’s not in a rush. Not yet. She’ll just keep swiping left, keep looking nice when she goes out, keep accepting invitations to social events, keep positive, keep slim, keep herself together, keep going.”

— Lisa Jewell

87. “It should be you missing and Ellie eating beans on toast.”

— Lisa Jewell

88. “A hug is not always the right answer, you know. But as she felt his arms around her, his warm breath against the crown of her head, she thought that it might not be an answer, but it was certainly better than yet another question.”

— Lisa Jewell

89. “That wearing shiny shoes with bows on and rolling your eyes at other kids is not a sign of maturity, but a sign that you’ve missed a whole set of steps on the road to maturity.”

— Lisa Jewell

90. “Poppy’s hands fall on to the book. ‘Stories’, she says, ’are the only thing in this world that are real. Everything else is just a dream.”

— Lisa Jewell

91. “It’s amazing how boring you can get away with being when you’re pretty. No one seems to notice. When you’re pretty everyone just assumes you must have a great life. People are so short-sighted, sometimes. People are so stupid.”

— Lisa Jewell

92. “Someone, somewhere has liked something that Jasmine has posted on Instagram. This means that Alice’s phone will continue to pop for the next ten minutes or so as everyone Jasmine knows likes the thing she posted. Alice pictures a sea of disembodied thumbs senselessly pressing hearts. She sighs.”

— Lisa Jewell

93. “Once you had a reputation for being nice you couldn’t mess with it.”

— Lisa Jewell

94. “I have exquisite taste, but I just don’t know how to put tasteful things together in any semblance of visual harmony. No. I am not good at creating visual harmony. It’s OK. I’m good at lots of other things.”

— Lisa Jewell

95. “She read it through just once, before pressing send and propelling it forcefully, wantonly, thoughtlessly into the universe, where it would change the course of her life in ways that she could not possibly have imagined.”

— Lisa Jewell

96. “Absolutely spine-chilling stuff, with some shocking glimpses into the darkest corners of humanity: we guarantee you’ll be bingeing the whole thing in a day.”

— Lisa Jewell

97. “It’s clearly not a topic he wants to give any oxygen to.”

— Lisa Jewell

98. “Zach isn’t liberal. He has no time for political correctness. He is his mother’s son: small-minded, self-absorbed, inward-thinking, a little bit racist, a little bit homophobic, a little bit misogynistic. All those things that don’t matter when you’re fourteen and in love, but start to sprout insidiously to the surface over the years it takes you to go from child to adult, and even now it’s not blatant but she knows him well enough to know that it’s there.”

— Lisa Jewell

99. “I was protective of my antisocial persona in many ways. It felt safe to be invisible. No one had any expectations of me, and after eighteen years living in my parents’ house it was liberating not to be expected to do anything or be anything. So it was ambiguous, this feeling. On the one hand I wanted to be like these golden girls. On the other I felt far superior to them.”

— Lisa Jewell

100. “And when you hate someone, it leaves deeper scars on your psyche than loving someone ever can.”

— Lisa Jewell