Top 35 S.J. Watson Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I will never abandon you. I love you too much.”

— S.J. Watson

2. “Do you trust me? The question is usually asked before an admission that such trust is misplaced.”

— S.J. Watson

3. “I want him to be happy. And I want you to be happy, too. Even if you can only find that happiness without me.”

— S.J. Watson

4. “What are we, if not an accumulation of our memories?”

— S.J. Watson

5. “I closed my eyes and abandoned myself to my grief. It felt better, somehow, to be helpless. I didn’t feel ashamed.”

— S.J. Watson

6. “I wonder what I would find if I could go back and decipher the layers, if it were possible to delve into my past that way, but realize that, even if it were possible, it would be futile.”

— S.J. Watson

7. “It’s not life, it’s just an existence, jumping from one moment to the next with no idea of the past, and no plan for the future.”

— S.J. Watson

8. “I wish I hadn’t. I wish I’d fought for you. I was weak and stupid.”

— S.J. Watson

9. “And then, when there is nothing else between us but love, we can begin to find a way to truly be together.”

— S.J. Watson

10. “It’s so difficult, isn’t it? To see what’s going on when you’re in the absolute middle of something? It’s only with hindsight we can see things for what they are.”

— S.J. Watson

11. “There are memories I a better off without. Things better lost forever.”

— S.J. Watson

12. “I cannot imagine how I will cope when I discover that my life is behind me, has already happened, and I have nothing to show for it. No treasure house of collection, no wealth of experience, no accumulated wisdom to pass on. What are we, if not an accumulation of our memories?”

— S.J. Watson

13. “With him everything is a test, affection is measured, that given weighed against that which has been received, and the balance, more often than not, disappointing him.”

— S.J. Watson

14. “These snatched moments. Kneeling in front of the closet or leaning on the bed. Writing. I am feverish. It floods out of me, almost without thought. Pages and pages. I am here again now, while Ben thinks I am resting. I cannot stop. I want to write down everything. I wonder if this is what it was like when I wrote my novel, this pouring onto the page. Or had that been slower, more considered? I wish I could remember.”

— S.J. Watson

15. “Thoughts race, as if, in a mind devoid of memory, each idea has too much space to grow and move, to collide with others in a shower of sparks before spinning off into its own distance.”

— S.J. Watson

16. “I am an adult, but a damaged one.”

— S.J. Watson

17. “Whatever enjoyment I might have had at the time would disappear overnight like snow melting on a warm roof.”

— S.J. Watson

18. “I am floating, I thought, completely without anchor, at the mercy of the wind.”

— S.J. Watson

19. “There were never going to be any happy endings for me. I know that now. But that is all right.”

— S.J. Watson

20. “I guess sometimes it’s not so much about how long you’ve known someone, but about what you’ve been through together.”

— S.J. Watson

21. “Get busy achieving all the things in life you want to achieve”, she said, “because one day you’ll be fine and the next... ” I knew what she meant: Boom! My ambitions would disappear and all I would want to do would be to have children. “It’s what happened to me,” she said. “It’ll happen to you. It happens to everyone.”

— S.J. Watson

22. “How will I feel when I look in a mirror and see the reflection of my grandmother?”

— S.J. Watson

23. “Work. Write. Read. Keep putting words on the page, because that’s the only way you’ll get better.”

— S.J. Watson

24. “How tempting it must be for him to keep quiet, and how difficult life must be for him, knowing that I carry these jagged shards of memory with me always, everywhere, like tiny bombs, and at any moment one might pierce the surface and force me to go through the pain as if for the first time, taking him with me.”

— S.J. Watson

25. “Two wrongs don’t make anything right, but maybe they make things more equal.”

— S.J. Watson

26. “I think of my sponsor. Rachel. “Addiction is a patient disease,” she said to me once. “It’ll wait for your whole life, if it has to. Never forget that.”

— S.J. Watson

27. “His grief is not new. It has had the time to bed down within him, to become part of his foundations, rather than something that rocks them.”

— S.J. Watson

28. “Pain, or pleasure. I could not tell where one ended and the other began.”

— S.J. Watson

29. “The little things. Perhaps it is these trivialities I have been writing down in my book, these small hooks on which my whole life is hung.”

— S.J. Watson

30. “We both pretended to attach no significance to what had happened, and so revealed just how much significance there was.”

— S.J. Watson

31. “We’re wearing masks, all of us, all of the time. We’re presenting a face, a version of ourselves, to the world, to each other. We show a different face depending on who we’re with and what they expect of us. Even when we’re alone it’s just another mask, the version of ourselves we’d prefer to be.”

— S.J. Watson

32. “I am frightened to discover my past. What I have achieved, and what I have not.”

— S.J. Watson

33. “We tell ourselves often enough that something happened, we start to believe it, and then we can actually remember it.”

— S.J. Watson

34. “Why did he feel that wanting to make sense of my fractured life meant that I wanted to change it in some way?”

— S.J. Watson

35. “It’s only with hindsight we can see things for what they are.”

— S.J. Watson

36. “I saw his eyes go up and he looked past me, toward the door, as if he were watching it, waiting. But there was no one there, it did not open, no one left or came in. I wondered if he was actually dreaming of escape.”

— S.J. Watson