Me Before You Quotes
"I watched relationships begin and end across those tables, children transferred between divorcees, the guilty relief of those parents who couldn't face cooking, and the secret pleasure of pensioners at a fried breakfast."
"I hadn’t realized it was possible to miss my old job more than I already did."
"You know, you can only actually help someone who wants to be helped."
"You can’t blame her. Are you really telling me you’d stick around if I was paralysed from the neck down?"
"And he just pushed me away. He actually didn’t want me here. He made that very clear."
"His life is complicated, and it is important that he is encouraged to –"
"I suppose that’s one way of putting it. There are varying degrees, but in this case we are talking about complete loss of use of the legs, and very limited use of the hands and arms."
"We’ve got a new partner. Chap from New York. Bains. Dan Bains. You come up against him at all?"
"I’m sure it does with some people. Anyway, there must be a way around these things if you think imaginatively."
"But surely if you loved someone it was your job to stick with them? To help them through the depression? In sickness and in health, and all that?"
"The thing about being catapulted into a whole new life is that it forces you to rethink your idea of who you are. Or how you might seem to other people."
"It’s quite hard to stay calm and understanding when you see the same faces, the same mistakes made again and again."
"There seems to be something miraculous about seeing the relentless optimism of new growth after the bleakness of winter."
"Life did go on. That we were all part of some great cycle, some pattern that it was only God’s purpose to understand."
"It’s not exactly dynamic, is it? Not exactly full of ideas or interesting people or opportunities."
"It was a bit forced but it seemed to work for both of us. Sometimes it even seemed like a relief to him that there was someone prepared to be rude to him."
"I wanted to give my son something to look at. I wanted to tell him, silently, that things might change, grow or fail, but that life did go on."
"I realized, to my surprise, that I quite liked it."
"I don’t think I have the faintest idea what is right and wrong any more."
"Who knows? I don’t think I have the faintest idea what is right and wrong any more."
"It’s just that the thing you never understand about being a mother, until you are one, is that it is not the grown man – the galumphing, unshaven, stinking, opinionated offspring – you see before you, with his parking tickets and unpolished shoes and complicated love life. You see all the people he has ever been all rolled up into one."
"If you’d bothered to ask me, Clark. If you’d bothered to consult me just once about this so-called fun outing of ours, I could have told you. I hate horses, and horse racing. Always have. But you didn’t bother to ask me."
"Clark, every single place I go to now people look at me like I don’t belong."
"I chose not to think about Syed at the Job Centre and how I would explain my reasons for leaving this most well paid of menial jobs."
"I had a hundred and seventeen days in which to convince Will Traynor that he had a reason to live."
"I am simply requiring you to fulfil your contractual obligations."
"First I put on what I thought of as my ‘artistic’ outfit, a green smock dress with huge amber beads stitched into it."
"‘You look like you’re about to serve the ice creams,’ Will said."
"‘So?’ he shrugged. ‘Look, Clark, if you’re going to wear a dress like that you need to wear it with confidence. You need to fill it mentally as well as physically.’"
"‘You look great, Clark,’ he said, quietly. ‘Really.’"
"‘Unfortunate falling-out with MI6,’ just to see their reaction, but I never did."
"It’s always the way, when you live close by somewhere."
"I don’t want to go in just yet. I just want to sit and not have to think about…"
"I think we should both just be grateful that it wasn’t in your trousers."
"I don’t want to go in just yet. I just want to be a man who has been to a concert with a girl in a red dress. Just for a few minutes more."
"You have no idea, Clark, how frustrating it is to rely on someone else to put your words down for you."
"‘That’s the problem, Treen,’ I said, and threw the rest of my tea into the flower bed. ‘People always are.’"
"I could see you didn’t like that bit. In fact, I think you had tears in your eyes you hated it so much."
"I just… want to be a man who has been to a concert with a girl in a red dress. Just for a few minutes more."
"‘I’m not jealous of him.’ His tone was dismissive. ‘How could I be jealous of a cripple?’"
"I get really, really scared of how this is going to go. I know most people think living like me is about the worst thing that could happen. But it could get worse."
"Some mistakes just have greater consequences than others. But you don't have to let that night be the thing that defines you."
"Nobody wants to hear that stuff. Nobody wants you to talk about being afraid, or in pain, or being scared of dying through some stupid, random infection."
"I’m not expecting to recover. I’m talking about learning to embrace a new life."
"You, Clark, have the choice not to let that happen."
"I'm trying to encourage Louisa to do something else, to widen her horizons a bit."
"You don’t need me to tell you it wasn’t your fault."
"I think if you grow up as he had done, with wealthy parents, in a nice house, if you go to good schools and nice restaurants as a matter of course, you probably just have this sense that good things will fall into place, that your position in the world is naturally an elevated one."
"You, Clark, are the only person I have felt able to talk to since I ended up in this bloody thing."
"I am doing everything I can, Louisa, to stop this thing. You know the task we’re facing."
"It’s okay, Clark, I’ll pay. Go on, and then you can stop worrying about how much you’ve drunk."
"It would please me no end to see you get hammered on Alicia’s father’s bill."
"He could be happy, if surrounded by the right people, if allowed to be Will, instead of The Man in the Wheelchair."
"You don’t want to go and strut your stuff, Louisa? God, no. Jolly sensible of you."
"Sometimes, Clark, you are pretty much the only thing that makes me want to get up in the morning."
"I think you’re permanently just a little bit behind the rest of the field."
"You're going to feel uncomfortable in your new world for a bit. It always does feel strange to be knocked out of your comfort zone."
"You have made that time more precious than you can imagine. You stopped it being an endurance test."
"I have done more, lived more, in the last six months than in the last twenty-seven years of my life."
"I’m not giving the money to you because I want you to feel wistful, or indebted to me, or to feel that it’s some kind of bloody memorial."
"I’m giving you this because there is not much that makes me happy any more, but you do."
"Your face when you came back from diving that time told me everything; there is a hunger in you, Clark. A fearlessness."
"You are scored on my heart, Clark. You were from the first day you walked in, with your ridiculous clothes and your bad jokes and your complete inability to ever hide a single thing you felt."
"I loved my life, Clark. Really loved it. I loved my job, my travels, the things I was. I loved being a physical person."
"It’s not a matter of giving you a chance. I’ve watched you these six months becoming a whole different person, someone who is only just beginning to see her possibilities."