Top 120 Lisa Jewell Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “But nothing was often everything in forensics. Nothing could often be the answer to the whole bloody thing.”

— Lisa Jewell

52. “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

53. “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

54. “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

55. “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

56. “We’re all different.”

— Lisa Jewell

57. “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

58. “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

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. “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

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

— Lisa Jewell

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

— Lisa Jewell

65. “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

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

— Lisa Jewell

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

— Lisa Jewell

68. “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

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

— Lisa Jewell

70. “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

71. “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

72. “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

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

— Lisa Jewell

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

— Lisa Jewell

75. “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

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

— Lisa Jewell

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

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

— Lisa Jewell

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

— Lisa Jewell

81. “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

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

— Lisa Jewell

83. “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

84. “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

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

— Lisa Jewell

86. “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

87. “And also, I was in love with him and when you’re in love, you’ll forgive almost anything. It’s a trait that I’ve carried with me into adult life, unfortunately. I always fall in love with people who hate me.”

— Lisa Jewell

88. “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

89. “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

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

— Lisa Jewell

91. “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

92. “Don’t make promises,” she says, “just do what you can do. Just be what you can be. However flawed that it is.”

— Lisa Jewell

93. “I’m a dog person at heart and got the cats only because they’re easier for selfish people to look after.”

— Lisa Jewell

94. “Sophie’s gut reaction had been no. No no no no no. She was a Londoner. She was independent. She had a career of her own. A social life. Her family lived in London.”

— Lisa Jewell

95. “And there it is, the point which it all boils down to eventually. The point where there are no words, no theories, no explanations for behaviors that baffle and infuriate and hurt. Just that. Men.”

— Lisa Jewell

96. “I’m not sure, any more, I’m not sure about anything. But I’d happily try it. Try anything really, just to get back to myself.”

— Lisa Jewell

97. “But she knows this isn’t true. They’re more than just people. They’re a mood, a feeling, a vibe, an aspiration. They’re like a music video or a trailer for a really cool movie. They’re a billboard poster for a hip clothing brand.”

— Lisa Jewell

98. “And it occurs to her for the very first time that maybe Hanna isn’t intrinsically unhappy. That maybe she just doesn’t like her.”

— Lisa Jewell

99. “But even in the fog of their fading faculties, they are holding hands. There are their hands, clutched together between them. They don’t know who the prime minister is, they don’t know what day of the week, what month, or even what year it is. They can’t quite remember their daughters’ names and they certainly can’t remember if they had lunch today or what the plan is for supper tonight. They know nothing of any significance whatsoever. But they do know they love each other.”

— Lisa Jewell

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

— Lisa Jewell