Top 120 Lisa Jewell Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

102. “I had gone back to being the “other” Saffyre Maddox, the one who showed up in the classroom every morning clean and fresh, hair neatly tied back, some mascara, some lip gloss. It wasn’t so much that I actively wanted to look nice, it was more that if I didn’t look nice, people would worry, they’d ask me questions, the pastoral-care woman would pull me into her office and expect me to tell her what was wrong with me.”

— Lisa Jewell

103. “How much more of the taxpayers’ money can I throw at this thing? An evil woman. A woman loved by nobody, missed by nobody, a woman with shards of ice in her heart. A case of child abuse where no evidence remains, where numerous people were in the house, where no records of any description exist for an entire six-year period of time, where a family of itinerants moved in and took over without anyone ever knowing. It’s impossible. It’s terrible.”

— Lisa Jewell

104. “Libby can hear the whisper of every moment that this room has existed. Feel every breath of every person who has ever sat where she is sitting.”

— Lisa Jewell

105. “And by the way” – she looks up suddenly – “I’ve read every single Agatha Christie novel ever published. Twice. So I might even be quite useful.”

— Lisa Jewell

106. “And I remember my mother holding herself back from David, refusing to shine for fear of his desiring her.”

— Lisa Jewell

107. “My father’s going to take everything you own and then break your life.”

— Lisa Jewell

108. “No child wants to feel that they weren’t wanted, even if they don’t care much for the abandoner.”

— Lisa Jewell

109. “It’s very strange, looking back, how accepting children can be of the oddest scenarios.”

— Lisa Jewell

110. “Invisibility was my favorite state of existence.”

— Lisa Jewell

111. “Kim sometimes thinks that women practice being mothers on men until they become actual mothers, leaving behind a kind of vacancy.”

— Lisa Jewell

112. “Yes,” she said. “Yes. A hundred percent. My mum is so cool. And all she wants in the whole world is for me to be happy. So if you make me happy, she’ll like you.”

— Lisa Jewell

113. “She felt a terrible hollowness open up inside her, a sense that she was all alone, that she had in fact always been all alone, that the corners of her life were folding in and folding in, and that there was nothing she could do about it.”

— Lisa Jewell

114. “The things that happened behind the closed door of that house were appalling, and like a coward, I did a flit. I left them to it.”

— Lisa Jewell

115. “Wanting to die and dying are generally unrelated.”

— Lisa Jewell

116. “Terrible, dreadful, blasted awful kids. They’ve all got a darkness inside them. They’ve all got the capacity of evil.”

— Lisa Jewell

117. “People could look and see just a man, but in the same glance, the answer to all their problems.”

— Lisa Jewell

118. “There’s a heat contained within their exchange, created from the energy of desperation and loss and frustration and misguided hope, but also from the intimacy that’s built up between the two of them as everything else has peeled away from them and the thing that unites them.”

— Lisa Jewell

119. “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

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

— Lisa Jewell

121. “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

122. “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

123. “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

124. “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

125. “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

126. “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

127. “But we all behaved badly in that house; not one of us got out of there without a black mark. I’ve come to accept our sins as survival strategies.”

— Lisa Jewell

128. “And it was them; I knew it clearly. It was them, draining the house, like vampires, of all of its decent energy, of all of its love and life and goodness, draining it all for themselves, feasting on our misery and our broken spirits.”

— Lisa Jewell

129. “The front door goes again, and Josh appears. Cate’s heart lifts a little. While Georgia always arrives with news and moods and announcements and atmospheres, her little brother arrives as though he’d never left. He doesn’t bring things in with him, his issues unfurl gently and in good time.”

— Lisa Jewell

130. “But what I’ve found, Nathan, is that life shows you the way when you forget to make one. So, you know, let’s wait and see.”

— Lisa Jewell

131. “He knows there’s more to life than five major events, that life is made up of all the moments in between.”

— Lisa Jewell

132. “As an adult man now of forty-one years old I have often used this refrain to get people to do what I want them to do. I didn’t know who else to turn to. It gives the person your trying to manipulate nowhere to go. Their only option is to capitulate.”

— Lisa Jewell

133. “He left immediately, of course. He never wasted a beat when it came to Scarlett. She was his lifeforce, his meaning. He was nothing before Scarlett and he would return to nothing after her. When she needed him, he came to life, like a marionette taken out of a box.”

— Lisa Jewell

134. “Five minutes ago her joys in life had been small, anticipated, longed-for, hard-earned and saved-up-for, inconsequential little splurges that meant nothing in the scheme of things but gave the flat surface of her life enough sparkles to make it worth getting out of bed every morning to go and do a job which she liked but didn’t love.”

— Lisa Jewell

135. “I have done my best with what nature gave me. Money can’t buy you love but it can buy you a chiseled jaw, perfectly aligned teeth, and plumped-up lips.”

— Lisa Jewell