The Secret of Happy Ever After Quotes

“A town without a bookshop is a town without a soul.”
― Lucy Dillon, The Secret of Happy Ever After

“All i care about is giving you the happy ever after you want. In our own messy, complicated way.”
― Lucy Dillon, The Secret of Happy Ever After

“The bookshop felt damp and chilly, but it was still and unsupervised bookshop, and Anna felt a frisson of excitement as she scanned the shelves with greedy eyes. Libraries weren't quite the same, she'd found; something about the prosaic smell of other people's houses and fingers seeping off the pages diluted that sense of magical worlds, but untouched, unread, unexplored books were something else.”
― Lucy Dillon, The Secret of Happy Ever After

“Nice people sometimes do terrible things because they don't want to do one small mean thing. It doesn't automatically make them a bad person forever.”
― Lucy Dillon, The Secret of Happy Ever After

“Don't worry about what you did yesterday, he said, often, worry about what you haven't done today.”
― Lucy Dillon, The Secret of Happy Ever After

“She could remember feeling that disorienting first rush of love, as bright and light as if no one else had ever felt it, as if you were looking down into the ultimate pool of emotional revelation. She also remembered how stupid it made you.”
― Lucy Dillon, The Secret of Happy Ever After

“Just now. I”
― Lucy Dillon, The Secret of Happy Ever After

“She'd shaped her life around the one night, like a tree growing crookedly around a wall, growing only to cover it up, never branching outwards. Just inwards.”
― Lucy Dillon, The Secret of Happy Ever After

“She stared unseeing at the park railings, the black paint flaking away in chunks, exposing the Victorian iron beneath. Why hadn’t it come? How had she got to thirty-one, been married and nearly divorced, and never felt the knee-weakening passion even frumpy, mousy Tory Maxwell had enjoyed? Michelle knew herself well enough to know the answer. Because she hadn’t let it come. It was easier to keep everything at arm’s length, under control, because this new Michelle, the bright tough Michelle, was not the sort of girl who let things happen to her, not like hopeless romantic Tory. The old Michelle, the girl who’d sat in the library with her shoes off, reading when she should have been revising, reading when she should have been training, reading when she should have been listening to good advice and not believing in easy happy ever afters . . . That Michelle let things happen to her, not the other way round. Her heart contracted as if an invisible hand were trying to squeeze it dry. I want to be loved, she thought in one sudden clear pang. I want to be held. I want to be swept away by someone. When”
― Lucy Dillon, The Secret of Happy Ever After

“to see her, Rory less so. To her mortification, Michelle”
― Lucy Dillon, The Secret of Happy Ever After

“Books matter. They are an inspiration, an escape. Something bigger than we are...”
― Lucy Dillon, The Secret of Happy Ever After