16 Quotes From After You By Jojo Moyes You Need To Read While Moving On

The best books, are the ones that speak to us best. The ones we can relate to most. It almost feels like you found someone who understands you, and it’s the best feeling ever. You realize that you’re not alone in this, for we need to be told, every now and then, that what we’re feeling, what we’re experiencing is normal.

Below are some quotes from After You by Jojo Moyes you need to read if you’re grieving and trying to move on.

#1.

“How could I convey the way those short months had changed the way I felt about everything? The way he had skewed my world so totally that it made no sense without him in it? And when it came down to it, what was the point in reexamining your sadness all the time anyway? It was like picking at a wound and refusing to let it heal. I knew what I had been part of. I knew what my role was. What was the point in going over and over it?”

– After you- Jojo Moyes

#2.

“On evenings like this, when the streets below were filled with couples strolling, and laughing people spilled out of pubs, already planning meals, nights out, trips to clubs, something ached inside me; something primal telling me that I was in the wrong place, that I was missing something. These were the moments when I felt most left behind.”

– After you- Jojo Moyes

#3.

“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.”

– After you- Jojo Moyes

#4.

“Here’s a real question. How long do you think it takes to get over someone dying? Someone you really loved, I mean.’….

‘… I’m not sure you ever do.’

‘That’s cheery.’

‘No. Really. I’ve thought about it a lot. You learn to live with it, with them. Because they do stay with you, even if they’re not living, breathing people any more. It’s not the same crushing grief you felt at first, the kind that swamps you, and makes you want to cry in the wrong places, and get irrationally angry with all the idiots who are still alive when the person you love is dead. It’s just something you learn to accommodate. Like adapting around a hole. I don’t know. It’s like you become … a doughnut instead of a bun.’”

– After you- Jojo Moyes

#5.

“Sometimes I felt as if we were all wading around in grief, reluctant to admit to others how far we were waving or drowning.”

– After you- Jojo Moyes

#6.

“It was what we all wanted, ultimately, to be freed from our grief. To be released from this underworld of the dead, half our hearts lost underground, or trapped in little porcelain urns. It felt good to have something positive to say for once.”

– After you- Jojo Moyes

#7.

“And then the stupid hot tears would leak out of my stupid eyes and I would screw them up and tell myself that this was what you got for letting anyone close. Depression, we had learned in the group, loves a vacuum. Far better to be doing, or at least planning. Sometimes the illusion of happiness could inadvertently create it.”

– After you- Jojo Moyes

#8.

“no journey out of grief was straightforward. There would be good days and bad days. Today was just a bad day, a kink in the road, to be traversed and survived.”

– After you- Jojo Moyes

#9.

“I gazed around me, like someone suddenly handed clear glasses, and saw that pretty much everyone bore the brutal imprint of love, whether lost, whipped away from them or simply vanished into a grave.”

– After you- Jojo Moyes

#10.

“The only way to avoid being left behind was to start moving.”

– After you- Jojo Moyes

#11.

“I think people get bored of grief…It’s like you’re allowed some unspoken allotted time—six months maybe—and then they get faintly irritated that you’re not ‘better,’ like you’re being self-indulgent hanging on to your unhappiness.”

– After you- Jojo Moyes

#12.

“You live. And you throw yourself into everything and try not to think about the bruises.”

– After you- Jojo Moyes

#13.

“So here is the thing about being involved in a catastrophic, life-changing event. You think it’s just the catastrophic life-changing event that you’re going to have to deal with: the flashbacks, the sleepless nights, the endless running over events in your head, asking yourself if you had done the right thing, said the things you should have said, whether you could have changed things, had you done it even a degree differently.”

– After you- Jojo Moyes

#14.

“When someone we love is snatched from us, it often feels very hard to make plans. Sometimes people feel like they have lost faith in the future,”

– After you- Jojo Moyes

#15.

“I told myself firmly that it was just a feeling, the echo of an anxiety. I could overcome it, just as I would overcome everything else.”

– After you- Jojo Moyes

#16.

“None of us moves on without a backward look. We move on always carrying with us those we have lost. What we aim to do in our little group is ensure that carrying them is not a burden that feels impossible to bear, a weight keeping us stuck in the same place. We want their presence to feel like a gift. ‘And what we learn through sharing our memories and our sadnesses and our little victories with each other is that it’s okay to feel sad. Or lost. Or angry. It’s okay to feel a whole host of things that other people might not understand, and often for a long time. Everyone has his or her own journey. We don’t judge… ‘And that, impossible as it may feel at first, we will each get to a point where we can rejoice in the fact that every person we have discussed and mourned and grieved over was here, walking among us – and whether they were taken after six months or sixty years, we were lucky to have them.’”

– After you- Jojo Moyes