Me Before You by Jo Jo Moyes

I gave this book 5 stars. Very rare for me. I was blown away by the depth of the characters (even the minor ones) and the controversial storyline. I had a severe book hangover after reading it and found myself thumbing back though just to reread parts. I read it so fast the first time to see what would happen, that I may have to reread the entire book again soon. Maybe this week.


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. Page 58


I needed to tell him, silently, that things might change, grow, or fail, but that life did go on. That we were all part of some great cycle, some pattern that it was only God's purpose to understand. I couldn't say that to him, of course - Will and I have never been able to say much to each other - but I wanted to show him. A silent promise, if you like, that there was a bigger picture, a brighter future. Page 107


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. ....I saw the vulnerabilities, the love, the history. That's what he was asking me to extinguish - the small child as well as the man - all that love, all that history. Page 110


And as I stared, I began to realize what I was taking on.
     I would have to fill those little white rectangles with a lifetime of things that could generate happiness, contentment, satisfaction, or pleasure. I would have to fill them with every good experience I could summon up for a man whose powerless arms and legs meant he could no longer make them happen by himself. Page 137


And it made my imagination do unexpected things; as I sat there, I found myself thinking of things I hadn't thought of for years, old emotions washing over me, new thoughts and ideas being pulled from me as if my perception itself were being stretched out of shape. It was almost too much, but I didn't want it to stop. I wanted to sit there forever. I stole a look at Will. He was rapt, suddenly unself-conscious. I turned away, unexpectedly afraid to look at him. I was afraid of what he might be feeling, the depth of his loss, the extent of his fears. Will Traynor's life had been so far beyond the experiences of mine. who was I to tell him how he should want to live it? Page 164


I hadn't realized that music could unlock things in you, could transport you to somewhere even the composer hadn't predicted. It left an imprint in the air around you, as if you carried its remnants with you when you went. Page 164


"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." Page 166


"You only get one life. It's actually your duty to live it as fully as possible." page 194


     "I worked out what would make me happy, and I worked out what I wanted to do, and I trained myself to do the job that would make those two things happen."
     "You make it sound so simple."
     "It is simple," he said. "The thing is, it's also a lot of hard work. And people don't want to put in a lot of work." Page 204


"Some mistakes...Just have greater consequences than others. but you don't have to let that night be the thing that defines you." Page 247


"...I'm not expecting to recover," he said.
     "I'm not talking about physically," she said. "I'm talking about leaning to embrace a new life." Page 260


"Why didn't you make me do that earlier? All that! It was all there, all the time! Just under my nose!"
     Will gazed at me steadily. He said nothing at first, but his smile was slow and wide. "I don't know Clark. Some people just won't be told." Page 320


     "I don't want to go home," I said into the darkness.
     "It's a hard place to leave."
     "I didn't think places like this existed outside films," I said, turning so that I faced him. "It has actually made me wonder if you might have been telling the truth about all the other stuff." page 321


I drew the world he had created for me, full of wonder and possibility. I let him know a hurt had been mended in a way that he couldn't have known, and for that alone there would always be a piece of me indebted to him. Page 359


...I told myself that, somewhere, tiny particles of him would become tiny particles of me, ingested, swallowed, alive, perpetual. I wanted to press every bit of me against him. I wanted to give him every bit of life I felt and force him to live.
     I realized I was afraid of living without him. 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? Page 360


Knowing you still have possibilities is a luxury. Page 368


You are scored on my heart, Clark. You were from the first day you walked in,....You changed my life so much more than this money will ever change yours. Page 368

The Quiet Game by Greg Iles

     The thought of Penn Cage helpless would shock most people who know me. At thirty-eight years old, I have sent sixteen men and women to death row. I watched seven of them die. I've killed in defense of my family. I've given up one successful career and made a greater success of another. I am admired by my friends, feared by my enemies, loved by those who matter. But in the face of my child's grief, I am powerless. page 2


     Something in my mother's voice triggers an alarm. I can't say what it is, because it's in the spaces, not the words, the way you hear things in families. page 8


In this room I educated myself, discovered my gift for language, learned that the larger world lay not across oceans but within the human mind and heart. Years spent in this room made law school relatively simple and becoming a writer possible, even necessary. page 34


"... I've been away for years, but no one who grows up here ever really leaves this town behind." page 47


"...Because the day of reckoning always comes, when everything you've tried to repress rears up in the road to meet you. Whatever you bury deepest is always waiting for the moment of greatest stress to explode to the surface." page 51


In the face of grief, words have no power. page 68


     Einstein said the arrow of time flies in only one direction. Faulkner, being from Mississippi, understood the matter differently. He said the past is never dead; it's not even the past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity. Haunted by wrong turns and roads not taken, we pursue images perceived as new but whose provenance dates to the dim dramas of childhood, which are themselves but ripples of consequence echoing down the generations. The quotidian demands of life distract from this resonance of images and events, but some of us feel it always.
     And who among us, offered the chance, would not relive the day or hour in which we first knew love, or ecstasy, or made a choice that forever altered our future, negating a life we might have had? Such chances are rarely granted. Memory and grief prove Faulkner right enough, but Einstein knew the finality of action. If I cannot change what I had for lunch yesterday, I certainly cannot unmake a marriage, erase the betrayal of a friend, or board a ship that left port twenty years ago. page 289


Our actions have consequences that last long after us, entwining the present with the future in ways we cannot begin to understand. I have resolved a simple thing: I will do those things which make me happy today, and which I can also live with ten years from now. page 597


Their laughter is like lamplight in the dark. page 597