A face whose emotions had not yet been battered by experience.

— Jojo Moyes

All Chelsea's internet dates were gorgeous. Until she met them.

— Jojo Moyes

And it was suddenly very simple: There was no choice.

— Jojo Moyes

And there it was. He knew it, and I knew it. There was nothing left for me to do. Do you know how hard it is to say nothing ? When every atom of you strains to do the opposite? I just tried to be, tried to absorb the man I loved through osmosis, tried to imprint what I had left of him on myself. I did not speak...

— Jojo Moyes

Because even if the whole world was throwing rocks at you, if you still had your mother or father at your back, you'd be okay.

— Jojo Moyes

Because even if the whole world was throwing rocks at you, if you still had your mother or father at your back, you’d be okay.

— Jojo Moyes

Because even if the whole world was throwing rocks at you, if you still had your mother or father at your back, you’d be okay. Some deep-rooted part of you would know you were loved. That you deserved to be loved.

— Jojo Moyes

Be thrown into a new life (or at least thrown with such force against the life of someone who is like squashed his face against the window) forces you to rethink who you are. Or what causes impression for others

— Jojo Moyes

But I knew very well how the persona you chose to present to the world could be very different from what was inside. I knew how grief could make you behave in ways you couldn’t even begin to understand.

— Jojo Moyes

But now, inside the gallery, something happens to him. He finds his emotions gripped by the paintings, the huge, colorful canvases by Diego Rivera, the tiny, agonized self-portraits by Frida Kahlo, the woman Rivera loved. Fabien barely notices the crowds that cluster in front of the pictures. He stops before a perfect little painting in which she has pictured her spine as a cracked column. There is something about the grief in her eyes that won't let him look away. That is suffering, he thinks. He thinks about how long he's been moping about Sandrine, and it makes him feel embarrassed, self-indulgent. Theirs, he suspects, was not an epic love story like Diego and Frida's. He finds himself coming back again and again to stand in front of the same pictures, reading about the couple's life, the passion they shared for their art, for workers' rights, for each other. He feels an appetite growing within him for something bigger, better, more meaningful. Furthermore, he wants to live like these people. Furthermore, he has to make his writing better, to keep going. Furthermore, he has to. He is filled with an urge to go home and write something that is fresh and new and has in it the honesty of these pictures. Most of all he just wants to write. But what?

— Jojo Moyes