What do you think?
Rate this book
503 pages, Paperback
First published December 31, 2012
‘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.’
“All I can say is that you make me...you make me into someone I couldn't even imagine. You make me happy, even when you're awful.I would rather be with you- even the you that you seem to think is diminished- than with anyone else in the world.”
“I thought, briefly, that I would never feel as intensely connected to the world, to another human being, as I did at that moment.”
"It has been, the best six months of my entire life."
"Funnily enough, Clark, mine too."
“I thought, briefly, that I would never feel as intensely connected to the world, to another human being, as I did at that moment.”
“...I told him a story of two people. Two people who shouldn't have met, and who didn't like each other much when they did, but who found they were the only two people in the world who could possibly have understood each other.”
“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 only get one life. It's actually your duty to live it as fully as possible.”
“How is it you have the right to destroy my life, I wanted to demand of him, but I’m not allowed a say in yours?”
“Hey Clark', he said.'Tell me something good'. I stared out of the window at the bright-blue Swiss sky and I told him a story of two people. Two people who shouldn't have met, and who didn't like each other much when they did, but who found they were the only two people in the world who could possibly have understood each other."
"I drew a world for him, a world in which he was still somehow the person he had wanted to be. I drew the world he had created for me, full of wonder and possibility.”
I was twenty-six years old and I wasn’t really sure what I was. Up until I lost my job I hadn’t even given it any thought. I supposed I would probably marry Patrick, knock out a few kids, live a few streets away from where I had always lived. Apart from an exotic taste in clothes, and the fact that I’m a bit short, there’s not a lot separating me from anyone you might pass in the street. You probably wouldn’t look at me twice. An ordinary girl, leading an ordinary life. It actually suited me fine.
“I will never, ever regret the things I've done. Because most days, all you have are places in your memory that you can go to.”
“The thing about being catapulted into a whole new life--or at least, shoved up so hard against someone else's life that you might as well have your face pressed against their window--is that it forces you to rethink your idea of who you are. Or how you might seem to other people.”
“Some mistakes... Just have greater consequences than others. But you don't have to let the result of one mistake be the thing that defines you. You, Clark, have the choice not to let that happen.”
���I turned in my seat. Will’s face was in shadow and I couldn’t quite make it out.
‘Just hold on. Just for a minute.’
‘Are you all right?’ I found my gaze dropping towards his chair, afraid some part of him was pinched, or trapped, that I had got something wrong.
‘I’m fine. I just . . . ’
I could see his pale collar, his dark suit jacket a contrast against it.
‘I don’t want to go in just yet. I just want to sit and not have to think about . . . ’ He swallowed.
Even in the half-dark it seemed effortful.
‘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 released the door handle.
‘Sure.’
I closed my eyes and lay my head against the headrest, and we sat there together for a while longer, two people lost in remembered music, half hidden in the shadow of a castle on a moonlit hill.”