150 Quotes by Cecelia Ahern

But even in her laughter there was something missing. She never seemed to be truly happy; she just seemed to be passing time while she waited for something else. She was tired of just existing; she wanted to live.

Don't be afraid to fall in love again. Open your heart and follow where it leads you...and remember, shoot for the moon.

You deserve someone who loves you with every single beat of his heart, someone who thinks about you constantly, someone who spends every minute of every day just wondering what you’re doing, where you are, who you’re with, and if you’re OK. You need someone who can help you reach your dreams and protect you from your fears. You need someone who will treat you with respect, love every part of you, especially your flaws. You should be with someone who could make you happy, really happy, dancing on air happy.

Some people go through life searching and never find their soul mates. They never do. You and I did, we just happened to have them for a shorter period of time. It's sad, but it's life.

When people are going through difficult situations in life, it causes them to search a lot more. They search life and search their soul. When you’re searching, you’re suddenly a lot more open to the world around you, to the possibilities, to things you never thought about before. — When you’re happy, you don’t question the world so much. When you’re lost, you question everything. The very reason why it is so essential to human self-discovery

You shouldn't try to stop everything from happening. Sometimes you're supposed to feel awkward. Sometimes you're supposed to be vulnerable in front of people. Sometimes it's necessary because it's all part of you getting to the next part of yourself, the next day.

Today I love you more than ever; tomorrow I will love you even more. I need you more than ever, I want you more than ever.

But with your life you make a few bad decisions, get unlucky a few times, whatever, but you have to keep going, right?

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Every single ordinary person has an extraordinary story.

Sometimes we need all the glue we can get, just to hold ourselves together.

People forget they have options. And they forget that those things don't really matter. They should concentrate on what they have and not what they don't have. And by the way, wishing and dreaming doesn't mean concentrating on what you don't have, it's positive thinking that encourages hoping and believing, not whinging and moaning.

what you don't know, you don't miss

I’ve learned that home isn’t a place, it’s a feeling.

Remember that happiness is a way of travel, it's not a destination.

We're so arrogant, aren't we? So afraid of age, we do everything we can to prevent it. We don't realize what a privilege it is to grow old with someone. Someone who doesn't drive you to commit murder or doesn't humiliate you beyond repair.

I'm never overwhelmed or under it either; just nicely whelmed. I'm OK. Nothing spectacular but sometimes special. I look in the mirror and see this medium average person. A little tired, a little sad, but not falling apart.

Sighs and silences and avoided conversations are just as important as the things you do talk about.

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Life has a way of getting what it wants when it really knows what it wants.

Memories were fine but you couldn't touch them, smell them or hold them. They were never exactly as the moment was, and they faded with time.

But where pain was, healing could come; where loneliness was, new relationships could be formed; where rejection was, new love could be found. It was a moment. And moments changed. She would have to live through the moment to get to the next.

The more you try to simplify things the more you complicate them. You create rules, build walls, push people away, lie to yourself and ignore true feelings. That is not simplifying things.

There's no limit to what you can dream. You expect the unexpected, you believe in magic, in fairy tales, and in possibilities. Then you grow older and that innocence is shattered and somewhere along the way the reality of life gets in the way and you're hit by the realization that you can't be all you wanted to be, you just might have to settle for a little bit less.

Their plan had been very simple: to stay together for the rest of their lives.

Empty words almost echo within themselves

Everything in life has a place, and when one thing moves, it must go somewhere else.

Stop and take your time to notice things and make those things you notice matter.

God leads you to it and takes you through it.

You have the rest of your lives to catch up together. After all, soulmates always end up together. [...] Ey-girlfriends are easily forgotten. Best friends stay with you for ever.

Slow down. Stop trying to do everything now, now, now. Hold up the people behind you for all you care, feel them kicking at your heels but maintain your pace. Don't let anybody dictate your speed.

There was a magic about the sea. People were drawn to it. People wanted to love by it, swim in it, play in it, look at it. It was a living thing that was as unpredictable as a great stage actor: it could be calm and welcoming, opening its arms to embrace it's audience one moment, but then could explode with its stormy tempers, flinging people around, wanting them out, attacking coastlines, breaking down islands.

That was all part of giving someone a piece of your heart; they ended up taking a whole chunk of your mind and reserving it all for themselves.

Love was one of those feelings that you could never control.

Is not where I live happily ever after, or who with. It's the fact that I live happily ever after.

Age is just a number, not a state of mind or a reason for any type of particular behaviour.

I'm trying to make some sense out of the phrase "Everything happens for a reason," and I think I've figured out what the reason is - to pissed me off.

Often when we realize how precious those seconds are, it's too late for them to be captured because the moment has passed. We realize too late.

Time is more precious than gold, more precious than diamonds, more precious than oil or any valuable treasures. It is time that we do not have enough of; it is time that causes the war within our hearts, and so we must spend it wisely.

Every small thing grows when you nurture it, Rosie. Love is just the same. But if that is making you miserable then, leave and find something else that brings you happiness you deserve to feel.

There aren’t many sure things in life, but one thing I know for sure is that you have to deal with the consequences of your actions. You have to follow through on some things.

Truth is, something that I thought was perfect was taken away from me, and I never wanted perfect again. I wanted middle of the road, stuff I didn’t care about so that I couldn’t lose anything I really loved ever again.

There are certain kinds of silence that make you walk on air.

Our life is made up of time; our days are measured in hours, our pay measured by those hours, our knowledge is measured by years. We grab a few quick minutes in our busy day to have a coffee break. We rush back to our desks, we watch the clock, we live by appointments. And yet your time eventually runs out and you wonder in your heart of hearts if those seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years and decades were being spent the best way they possibly could. In other words, if you could change anything, would you?

To new beginnings. To the pursuit of...somethingness.

Love can change us beyond recognition, we become love-sick, soft-eyed jelly-bellied fools.

She wanted to be irresponsible, she wanted to be looked after, to be told that she didn't have to worry about a thing and that someone else would take care of everything. How easy life would be without having grown-up problems to worry about. And then she could grow up all over again.

the important thing is not what we (look) like,but the role we play in our best friend's life.

Some people say that you shouldn't operate from a place of fear but if there is no fear, how is there a challenge?

what a luxury it was for people to hold their loved ones whenever they wanted

If invisible people eat invisible food does invisible wind blow invisible trees?

That's the thing about lessons, you always learn them when you don't expect them or want them.

Oh, that fighting for peace is like screwing for virginity.

I make it easier for people to leave by making them hate me a little.

Nothing is never nothing. It's always something.

You've come to give me a piece of your mind. You know that phrase is really beautiful. The mind is the most powerful thing in the body. Whatever the mind believes, the body can achieve. So to give someone a piece of it... well thank you. Funny how people are always intent on giving it to the people they dislike when it really should be for the ones they love.

When you drop a glass or a plate to the ground, it makes a crashing sound. When a window shatters, a table breaks, or a picture fall of the wall, it makes noise. But as for your heart, when that breaks, it's completely silent... and you almost wish there was a noise to distract you from the pain.

Yes it's difficult. Yes it's horrible. Yes it's the worst thing that has ever happen in my whole life. But I just can't give up.

We all get lost once in a while, sometimes by choice, sometimes due to forces beyond our control. When we learn what it is our soul needs to learn, the path presents itself. Sometimes we see the way out but wander further and deeper despite ourselves; the fear, the anger or the sadness preventing us returning. Sometimes we prefer to be lost and wandering, sometimes it's easier. Sometimes we find our own way out. But regardless, always, we are found.

As the rain falls and the sun shines, they grow, grow, grow; minds so open, they go through life aware and accepting, seeing light where there's dark, seeing possibility in dead ends, tasting victory as others spit out failure, questioning where others accept. Just a little less jaded, a little less cynical.

She had been given a wonderful gift: life. Sometimes it was cruelly taken away too soon, but it's what you did with it that counted, not how long it lasted.

There's a fine line between love and hate. Love frees a soul and in the same breath can sometimes suffocate it.

Her best friend was gone and nobody understood that no amount of makeup, fresh air or shopping was going to fill the hole in her heart.

It's funny how people mark their lives, the benchmarks they choose to decide when the moment is more of a moment than any other. For life is made of them. I like to think the best ones of all are in my mind, that they run through my blood in their own memory bank for no one else but me to see.

Perhaps I’ve been rushing my whole entire life, jumping into things headfirst without thinking them through. Running through the days without noticing the minutes.

You never forget about things you've done that you know you shouldn't have done. They hang around your mind, linger like a thief casing a joint for a future job. You see them there, dramatically lurking nearby in striped monochrome, leaping behind postboxes as soon as your head whips around to confront them. Or it's a familiar face in a crowd that you glimpse but then lose sight of. An annoying Where's Wally? forever locked away and hidden in every thought in your conscience. The bad thing that you did, always there to let you know.

Dreams should make you think, ‘If I had the guts to do it and I didn’t care what anybody thought, this I what I’d really do’.

So now, all alone or not, you gotta walk ahead. Thing to remember is if we're all alone, then we're all together in that too.

are you saying that the feeling of searching for a missing sock is like searching for love ?

What if we knew what tomorrow would bring? Would we fix it? Could we?

Life... It's a great and terrible and short and endless thing. None of us come out of it alive.

Tonight I'm happy. I will worry about tomorrow when tomorrow comes. But I'm getting there.

How else do you think life happens? A series of coincidences and occurrences have to happen somehow. Our lives all crash and collide and you think there's no reason or rhyme to it? If there wasn't any reason for it all, what would be the point? Why do you think anything happens at all? There is an outcome, repercussions and occurrences to everybody you meet and everything you say.

Aim for what u want and the year will all make a sense.

As long as you're around, your life is too. So just as you shower love and affection and attention on the husbands, wives, parents, children and forever friends who sorround you, you have to do so equally with your life, because it's yours, it's you, and it's always there rooting for you, cheering you on, even when you feel like you can't do it. I gave up on my life for a while, but what I've learned is that even when that happens and especially when that happens, life never gives up on you.

I want a character to wake up one day and feel like, I can face it. That, to me, is happy. I want the characters to rescue themselves, though you use the relationships you have, to make you strong enough to be able to do that.

We don't realize what a privilege it is to grow old with someone.

Nice is OK when it's among other things but never when it stands alone

I suppose it’s easier to see the way out of anything when you’ve found your way out of that maze. When you’re stuck in the middle, in a series of dead-ends making circles, it’s difficult to make any sense of anything.

How presumptuous they had both been never to consider growing old as an achievement and a challenge. Aging was something they'd both wanted so much to avoid.

Maybe love is thinking that every time your partner does or says something mundane that you want to start a Mexican wave from here to Uzbekistan in utter delight.

Sometimes you have to give yourself to somebody in order to see who you are. Sometimes you have to unravel things to get to the core

Holly's theory about the army," Sharon explained. And what is it?" Denise asked, intrigued. Oh, that fighting for peace is like screwing for virginity.

Chin up, don’t smile, don’t cry, don’t fall, walk.

Holly smiled weakly. Gerry would know exactly how she was feeling, he would know exactly what to say and he would know exactly what to do. He would give her one of his famous hugs and all her problems would melt away. She grabbed a pillow from her bed and hugged it tight. She couldn't remember the last time she hugged someone, really hugged someone. And the depressing thing was that she couldn't imagine ever embracing anyone the same way again.

I'm most happy when I am writing at night, because I need space and time to write.

people who say its a long story, mean it's a stupid short one that they are too embarrassed and couldn't be bothered to tell

Hundreds of butts in piles on the ground to mark the spot, their lives sucked out of them by their users in panicked distressed frenzy, their souls floating around the insides of lungs while their outsides were dropped, stamped on and deserted

We haven't lost everything, if we haven't lost our hope.

We all make mistakes, some bigger than others, but none of us is perfect.

There is no advice that I can give you, you will just have to trust yourself that when the time comes, you'll make the right decision.

I don't know why, but there's always the part of you, the part that hides in the shadows protecting the self-destruct button, that doesn't ever want to leave the dark behind.

Nobody's life is filled with perfect little moments. And if it were, they wouldn't be perfect little moments. They would just be normal. How would you ever know happiness if you never experience downs?

Believe me, when you die, it's everybody else's but your problem

People forget they have options. And they forget that those things really don't matter. They should concentrate on what they have and not what they don't have.

Close your eyes and stare into the dark.

Our minds do unusual things sometimes, Tamara. When we’re looking for things it takes it upon itself to go down its own route. All we can do is follow

Children need close friends to help them grow up, to discover things about themselves and about life. They also need close friends to keep them sane

Love is not a theme. It's an atmosphere, a mood.

It’s not easy remembering the good times.

All people needed was time and then they could figure most things out of themselves.

She needed to talk, she needed to cry, she needed to vent all her frustrations and disappointments.

sometimes we have absolutely no idea where we are, we need the smallest clue to show us where to begin.

Not like a heart, which let people in without permission, held them in a special place she never had any say in and then yearned for them to remain there longer than they planned.

Children are the ones that know exactly what's going on in the world, you know. They 'see' more than adults, 'believe' in more, are honest, and will always, 'always' let you know where you stand.

Why do we stop believing in ourselves? Why do we let facts and figures and anything but dreams rule our lives?

We have a tendency to put ourselves last, we concentrate on everything else; work, friends, family, home issues, but we ignore the deeper stuff until it becomes so compressed that it can explode.

Time cant be given. But it can be shared.

You can run and run as fast and as far as you like, but the truth is, wherever you run, there you are.

The important thing is not what we look like, but the role we play in our best friend’s life. Friends choose certain friends because that’s the kind of company they are looking for at that specific time, not because they’re the correct height, age, or have the right hair color

It's like my garden, love. Everything grows. Including love. And with that growing everyday how can you expect missing her to ever fade away? Everything builds, including our ability to cope with it. That's how we keep going.

I have found that the many imbalances within our individual lives result in an overall more worldly balance. What I mean is that no matter how unfair I think something is, I need only look at the bigger picture to see how, in a way, it fits... however impossible it is to understand it or see it at the time.

Sometimes wrong numbers are the right numbers

I was the life and she was the soul of every party.

Imagining and fantasizing did nothing but break her heart.

Decide where and when you want to write. I like space, and silence is an inspiration to me.

Moments are precious, sometimes they linger and other times they're fleeing, and yet so much could be done in them; you could change a mind, you could save a life and you could even fall in love.

Katie is like my calendar, watching her grow and change. She is growing up so fast, learning to have opinions of her own, learning that I don’t have the answers to everything. And the moment a child begins to understand that, you know you’re in trouble.

For the yesterdays and todays, and the tomorrows I can hardly wait for - Thank you.

This house isn't mine anymore, but the memories are; the memories can't be sold. The building that housed my once-upon-a-time dreams stands for someone else now, as it did for the people before us, and I feel happy to let it go. Happy that I can begin again, anew, though bearing the scars of before. They represent wounds that have healed.

Don't ever take for granted when people look in your eyes; you have no idea how important it is to be acknowledged. Even if it's an angry stare, because it's when they ignore you, when they look right through you, that you should start worrying.

In truth, we're all just pottering, filling the time that we have here, only we like to make ourselves feel bigger by compiling lists of importance.

Her eyes, mostly cast downward, occasionally flicker upwards to meet his before falling again. She is apologetic for everything, as always, constantly saying sorry to the world, as though as her very presence offends.

That somehow dreams are a blurred line between here and there, like a meeting room in a prison. You’re both in the same room, yet on different sides and really, in different worlds.

Any tightrope walker can walk in a straight line and hold a cane at the same time. It's the balancing on the rope at those dizzying heights that they have to practise

If miracles had chemical equations then everyone would believe.

Life is everything, and you haven't lived it properly until you believe.

On the other hand, she was a women with a million happy memories, who knew what it was like to experience true love and who was ready to experience more life, more love and make new memories. Whether it happened in ten months or ten years, Holly would obey Gerry's final message. Whatever lay ahead, she knew she would open her heart and follow where it led. In the meantime, she would just live.

You all looked so happy together in the photograph. You looked like the perfect family. Is there such a thing anymore because if there is, my happy little unit was definitely not in the queue when they were handing out the titles.

Somewhere along the way, without me even noticing, I grew up Alex. For once, I couldn’t take advice from anyone around me about what I should or shouldn’t do. I couldn’t go running to mum and dad and I can’t compare my marriage to anybody else’s, we all follow our own rules.

Well isn’t that one thing you’re all the more wise for? Age has taught you something. It seems to me that you know the big secret. That nobody knows what’s going on

They say a story loses something with each telling.

That was other thing i hated about kids; they always said th exact things that deep dpwn you already knew, would never admit, and most certainly never wanted to hear.

To mention it was to ask a favor and that as you were too generous, and as for her to ask was always to have, she wouldn't

Alone because love was one of those feelings that you could never have control of. And she needed to be in control. She had loved before, had been loved, had tasted what it was to dream, and had felt what it was to dance on air. She had also learned what it was to cruelly land back on the earth with a thud.

Don't mind all those people who say that you should be back to normal in a month or two. Grieving is all part of helping yourself anyway.

Seeming and being are not one and the same.

He tried to tell me week after week to accept things as they were and move on with my life. But if there was one man who had put his life on hold to wait for something or someone, it was him.

Paths are so much clearer when people stop looking at what everyone else is doing and instead concentrate on themselves ~Gabe

Two lost things that had survived the seas and arrived on a coastline. What did they do? They implanted themselves in the sand and grew into trees and lined the beaches. Sometimes a lot can come of being all washed up. You can really grow.

When you're on your own, you look for signs. Sometimes you make them up, sometimes they're actually there, but most of the time you can't tell the difference from the two.

At moments when life is at its worst there are two things you can do: 1.) break down,lose hope and refuse to go on while lying face down on the ground banging your fists and kicking your legs, or 2.) laugh. Bobby and I did the latter.

We said we would meet again but we made no arrangements. Not out of any bad feeling between us, but because I felt it had all been said, or not said but understood, and she probably did too. To know she was there was enough, and for her to know I was around was probably too. Sometimes that's all people ever really need. Just to know.

This love thing awakened a group of slumbering senses in my body that I never even knew existed.

Anyway, it doesn't matter how much, how often, or how closely you keep an eye on things because you can't control it. Sometimes things and people just go. Just like that.

Alone or not, you gotta walk forward.

Day-to-day things, the mundane, are what keeps the motor running. How extraordinary the ordinary really is, a tool we all use to keep going, a template for sanity.

She didn't feel thirty. But then again again, what was being thirty supposed to feel like? When she was younger, thirty seemed so far away, she thought that a woman of that age would be so wise and knowledgeable, so settled in her life with a husband and children and a career. She had none of those things. She still felt as clueless as she had felt when she was twenty, only with a few more gray hairs and crow's feet around her eyes.

Being the best was as equal to being in the middle, which was equal to being the worst. All were merely a state of being. It was how a person felt in that state and why they were in that state that was the important thing.

More often than not, the easy decisions are the wrong decisions, and sometimes we feel like we're going backward when we're actually moving forward.

What is it with science these days? Everyone is so quick to believe in it, in all these new scientific discoveries, new pills for this, new pills for that. Get thinner, grow hair, yada, yada, yada, but when it requires a little faith in something you all go crazy.' He shook his head, 'If miracles had chemical equations then everyone would believe.

We each have our hiding places and we each put up with the little quirks of the people we love.

All families have their secrets, most people would never know them, but they know there are spaces, gaps where the answers should be, where someone should have sat, where someone used to be. A name that is never uttered, or uttered just once and never again. We all have our secrets.

I think that most people go to bookshops and have no idea what they want to buy. Somehow the books sit there, almost magically willing people to pick them up. The right person for the right book. Its as though they know whose life they need to be a part of, how they can make a difference, how they can teach a lesson, put a smile on a face at just the right time.

Most of all she loved that when she hugged him her head would rest neatly just below his chin, where she could feel his breath lightly blowing her hair and tickling her head.

oh well, is it hurting anyone? Because if its not and you’ve been given it, I’d as soon stop calling it a thing and start referring to it as a gift.

at your weakest, you end up showing more strength; at your lowest, you are suddenly lifted higher than you’ve ever been. They all border one another, these opposites and show how quickly we can be altered.

She couldn't remember the last time she hugged someone, really hugged someone.

One must not speak of such things. One is still scarred from that experience.

So many objects, so many memories. Each was being labelled and packed away in bags just as it was in her mind. To be stored in an area that would sometime be called upon to teach and help in future life.

A veil hangs between the two opposites, a mere slip of a thing that is transparent to warn us or comfort us. You hate now but look through this veil and see the possibility of love; you're sad now but look through to the other side and see happiness. Absolute composure to a complete mess - it happens so quickly, all in the blink of an eye.

Life is funny isn’t it? Just when you think you’ve got it all figured out, just when you finally begin to plan something, get excited about something, and feel like you know what direction you’re heading in, the paths change, the signs change, the wind blows the other way, north is suddenly south, and east is west, and you’re lost. It is so easy to lose your way, to lose direction. And that’s with following all the signposts

She strived for perfection. She loved setting herself tasks, sometimes impossible ones, to prove to her heart that underneath every seemingly ugly thing there was something beautiful inside.

There were hundreds of them spread across the floor, each telling its own tale of triumph or sadness, each letter representing a phase in her life. She had kept them all.

He was one of those people who made you feel like they either didn't know or didn't care that you were in the room and if they ever did acknowledge your existence it was bizarrely score one to you, and twenty years later they'd tell you they'd always had a crush on you but never had the courage to say anything and you'd tell them, What? I didn't even think you liked me? and they'd say, Are you crazy? I just never knew what to say!

You know, sarcasm is the lowest form of wit.' 'And yet it is still extremely funny.

That's what life is about: People come and go.

What seems tragic now won't even be an issue in a few years time.

I'd tried enough to know that anything long term wasn't going to work.

Yesterday was a closed book, tomorrow, however, was another story.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with returning to the house you grew up in every now and again. It's good for the soul.

Nobody can pretend to know what people want to read or hear or see. People rarely know it themselves; they only know it after the fact.

Always a chancer, always lucky, he'd fall into a river and come out dry, with fish in his pockets.

And nobody had told them that they were short on time.

Your heart can break at any age.

Journalism classes teach us that one must extract oneself from the story in order to report without bias, but often we need to be in the story in order to understand, to connect, to help the audience identify or else it has no heart; it could be a robot telling the story, for all anyone cares.

Have you ever not known something but known it at the same time?

Now let me teach you another thing about my daughter. I love her very much but she has the ability to hide as expertly as a sock in a washing machine. No one knows where it goes, just as no one knows where she goes, but at least when she decides to come back, we're all here, waiting for her.

Sometimes, people can go missing right before our very eyes. Sometimes, people can discover you, even though they've been looking at you the entire time. Sometimes, we lose sight of ourselves when we're not paying enough attention.