Top 150 Lisa Jewell Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “Once you had a reputation for being nice you couldn’t mess with it.”

— Lisa Jewell

102. “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

103. “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

104. “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

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

— Lisa Jewell

106. “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

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

— Lisa Jewell

108. “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

109. “But then she looks again at the blurred version of herself in the big window and suddenly she sees that the half-finished portrait is that of a queenly woman, not a gauche girl, and she knows that finally, after all these years, it is time to hold her life up to the light.”

— Lisa Jewell

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

— Lisa Jewell

111. “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

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. “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

114. “He didn’t wait to be formed by the universe. He shaped the universe to his will.”

— Lisa Jewell

115. “She was making a true crime podcast, out of the events of her own life.”

— Lisa Jewell

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

— Lisa Jewell

117. “Acting as if there is something wrong with me, when there isn’t. It’s the world that’s wrong, you and I both know that.”

— Lisa Jewell

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

— Lisa Jewell

119. “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

120. “When she doesn’t like the reality of things, she finds a reality she prefers.”

— Lisa Jewell

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

— Lisa Jewell

122. “Once again, she is struck by the sheer blandness of him, the impenetrable wall of nothingness between his physical being and the rest of the world. Yet he is clearly a master gaslighter. Behind the dead eyes lies the soul of a groomer and a liar and an abuser. She feels a bolt of ice shoot through her core and shivers slightly.”

— Lisa Jewell

123. “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

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

— Lisa Jewell

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

— Lisa Jewell

126. “He’d wanted this house because it was south-facing; he had his favorite suntrap spots in the garden, one in particular where he could sunbathe even in February, which he referred to as “Ibiza.” “I’m going to Ibiza for a bit,” he’d say on a sunny morning, a coffee in one hand, sunglasses on his head.”

— Lisa Jewell

127. “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

128. “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

129. “But I suppose the problem is that people often don’t realize that their lives are changing for the better until after the event, when they stop to look back.”

— Lisa Jewell

130. “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

131. “And he just looked at me and his eyes were this color, I don’t even know if there’s a word for it. Just the most incredible shade of nothing.”

— Lisa Jewell

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

— Lisa Jewell

133. “And she felt it then, like a needle in her heart, the love her mother always talked about. ‘You won’t understand how much I love you until you’re a mother yourself.”

— Lisa Jewell

134. “And as awful as it sounds, death is a clean break. There are no gray areas. No ambiguity. It’s like a blank canvas in a way.”

— Lisa Jewell

135. “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

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

— Lisa Jewell

137. “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

138. “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

139. “Where Josie is stiff and unanimated, her mother is all expansive hand gestures and chatter. She’s glamorous, too, clearly takes care of her appearance, sees herself as a woman worthy of attention and respect.”

— Lisa Jewell

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

— Lisa Jewell

141. “You know, like when you’re driving down windy roads and you deliberately close your eyes for a second, just to see what happens. So that’s what I did.”

— Lisa Jewell

142. “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

143. “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

144. “Remember you have choices.”

— Lisa Jewell

145. “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

146. “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

147. “The energy they give off is effervescent, a swirling, intoxicating aurora borealis of grating, glorious entitlement.”

— Lisa Jewell

148. “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

149. “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

150. “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