Top 35 Natasha Lunn Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “As I grew older, I learnt that the expectation that someone will save you from who you are, or from what you have or don’t have, is a fallacy. Expecting someone to fill in a hole that’s within you? That’s expecting too much of any one person. That’s not your friend’s job or your partner’s job. That’s your job.”

— Natasha Lunn

2. “After all, the people we love are a constellation. In loving them, it is our privilege to see and bring out all the different worlds and colours and depths within them, just as they have the potential to do the same for us in return.”

— Natasha Lunn

3. “I learnt that the loneliest place of all is lying in bed at night next to someone who makes you feel small, with your back to theirs, still hoping they will turn over and put their arms around you.”

— Natasha Lunn

4. “It doesn’t matter who you meet or when you meet them; there’s pain and joy on each side of the ledger. So don’t stick rigidly to one story about what your life means, because it’s likely to be wrong. In fact, there are many ways of living this life.”

— Natasha Lunn

5. “When you are not being honest in a relationship – to another person or to yourself – it is a little like screwing on the top of a jam jar when the ridges are out of line. An onlooker might think you are screwing it on just fine, but you can feel a stiffness developing that warns you it’s not on properly, and you know then that, however hard you try to keep turning it, the lid will never tightly seal.”

— Natasha Lunn

6. “The best definition of happiness is the ability to approach your life as this gorgeous, unfolding work of art that’s always changing, and never quite what you expect it to be.”

— Natasha Lunn

7. “Because when you like who you are when you are with another person, you realize how important it is to be around people who make you feel that way. They reflect your goodness back to you, and you know you’ve got it.”

— Natasha Lunn

8. “Some people come into our lives for a season, for a reason, for the simple purpose of showing us the world in a way we would never have seen it otherwise.”

— Natasha Lunn

9. “We spend our whole lives trying to meet targets set by someone else. We lose sight of who we are, because we’re so busy chasing external things.”

— Natasha Lunn

10. “Love is a lifelong project, a story that we can’t skip to the end of. How lucky are we, to know we will never finish it? Because there is never a final page, only a series of beginnings.”

— Natasha Lunn

11. “I’m here for the good and the bad and everything in between”. True friends see through any level of performance or denial or avoidance.”

— Natasha Lunn

12. “The best frame of mind to be in for anything you want is an ability to walk away from it, or it not to come right. Otherwise, you put yourself at the mercy of chance and people abusing your desperation. So... the capacity to say ‘I could be alone’ is strangely one of the most important guarantees of one day being with somebody else in a happy way.”

— Natasha Lunn

13. “Love is not a state of enthusiasm. It’s a verb. It implies action, demonstration, ritual, practices, communication, expression. It’s the ability to take responsibility of one’s own behavior. Responsibility is freedom.”

— Natasha Lunn

14. “We learn to keep our jagged bits inside for fear of appearing unattractive. I always thought there was a part of your messiness you saved for yourself, that no one else would ever see. It’s enormously humbling to realize how many times and ways my partner will pierce that. I can pretend I have all sorts of things together, but when I am at my most broken, he is still the person I turn to.”

— Natasha Lunn

15. “In that way my strength comes from love; at the roots of resilience – the ones that go deep in the earth and stop a tree getting blown over – is love.”

— Natasha Lunn

16. “And I grew to understand that the grief I felt equalled the love. – Greg Wise.”

— Natasha Lunn

17. “For me, the most beautiful thing about long-term love is understanding that a person has become necessary to your life. My life doesn’t make sense without my partner in it and I feel as necessary to her life as she is to mine.”

— Natasha Lunn

18. “And in my friendships, I need to work on breaking out of my role as caregiver, because that’s rooted in wanting to be needed. I’ve woven a big part of my identity through looking after people, and I know that part of love in friendship is asking for your needs to be met too.”

— Natasha Lunn

19. “But the truth of this life is that there’s a lot of pain in it. There’s more loss and grief than we want to believe. How we make peace with that is the journey we’re all trying to figure out.”

— Natasha Lunn

20. “Part of trying to figure out what you really want from life is ensuring you’re selective about who you surround yourself with.”

— Natasha Lunn

21. “No one really wants to be idealized – we want to be seen and accepted and forgiven, and to know that we can be ourselves in our less edifying moments.”

— Natasha Lunn

22. “In my earliest efforts at love, imagination was a thief that stole truth and perspective.”

— Natasha Lunn

23. “Maybe, then, this is how you try to bear the burden of the mystery with grace: by finding humility where you once saw self-pity, and opportunity where you once saw absence. By saying, ‘Even if I don’t get what I want, I have a good life,’ then paying closer attention to the small details that make that life beautiful. And by never forgetting that not knowing what will happen next also means that anything could.”

— Natasha Lunn

24. “All of us take so much for granted. Life is beautiful and we don’t have time to realize it. We let silly and petty things rule us and lead us into criticism. We find fault with life because we are tired and grumpy, instead of relishing the fact that we are with other people who are healthy, who love us and want to be with us.”

— Natasha Lunn

25. “The bigger challenge, I think, is how do we carry those losses inside us without letting them distract us too much from our lives.”

— Natasha Lunn

26. “Sometimes, I realized, we lose more from fear itself than the thing we are afraid of.”

— Natasha Lunn

27. “It’s important when you’ve good news to tell the right people. People who understand the dream or have a dream of their own. Otherwise, you end up feeling deflated.”

— Natasha Lunn

28. “My longing was a restlessness that spread out into my life like a mist. I could not see anything clearly with it there.”

— Natasha Lunn

29. “Until you stop skim-reading your friend or lover or family member, and instead read them more closely, as a never-ending story. A story whose plot you cannot control, or rewrite, or ever fully finish.”

— Natasha Lunn

30. “Why did we every think that everything was perfect? Why did we ever think that loss wasn’t part of what it is to be a human being? Why does it come as such a shock to us?”

— Natasha Lunn

31. “We need to stop tying ourselves so narrowly to this punitive vision that we’ve got to date in our twenties, find the ideal partner by twenty-eight, and have our first child at thirty-one, otherwise our life will be miserable. If that sort of narrative happens, it’ll be great in some ways and it’ll be awful in others. We need to show more imagination about what a good life might look like.”

— Natasha Lunn

32. “Now I think it’s about separating the idea of ‘I will only be happy if I have a partner’ from wanting companionship. Because it’s not the wanting love that’s the problem, it’s believing that you can only be happy in a relationship.”

— Natasha Lunn

33. “As trite as it sounds, I think the key is that, when women start having children, it’s sometimes very painful and stressful and claustrophobic and boring and lonely. And what is also a fundamental truth is that it is incredibly painful, stressful, claustrophobic, boring and lonely to not have a family when you want one. Neither experience is more painful or more difficult than the other.”

— Natasha Lunn

34. “Through all of these small moments – the joyful familiar Sunday afternoons and the painful drunken fights – we have a choice. In the joyful ones, will we overlook the beauty, or will we be consciously present? And in the painful ones, will we decide it’s easier to shut the conversation down than to dig for the uncomfortable truths? Or will we find a way back to a loving place?”

— Natasha Lunn

35. “Even if I don’t get what I want, I have a good life.”

— Natasha Lunn

36. “The bigger challenge, I think, is how do we carry those losses inside us without letting them distract us too much from our lives... it’s worthwhile to realize that we are still ourselves, that there is an essential self that’s still there, separate to the future you might have lost.”

— Natasha Lunn

37. “Diana Evans once said to me: ‘I do sense that there isn’t an end to love and that people you love never really leave you. You never lose their love because it adds something to you.’ It seems we go on loving people after they die because the love we shared with them changes us, becomes a living part of us, a piece of them we can never lose.”

— Natasha Lunn

38. “I hadn’t really needed an answer; I just wanted to say our worst fear out loud to take away its power.”

— Natasha Lunn