Me Before You

by

Jojo Moyes

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Chapter 1 Quotes

I had never considered that you might miss a job the way you miss a limb – a constant, reflexive thing. I hadn’t thought that as well as the obvious fears about money, and your future, losing your job would make you feel inadequate, and a bit useless.

Related Characters: Louisa (Lou) Clark (speaker)
Page Number: 18
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 2 Quotes

I am 26 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…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.

Related Characters: Louisa (Lou) Clark (speaker)
Page Number: 21
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 3 Quotes

“You were just looking at my photographs. Wondering how awful it must be to live like that and then turn into a cripple.”

Related Characters: Will Traynor (speaker), Louisa (Lou) Clark
Page Number: 42-43
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4 Quotes

“I know what you’re thinking,” she said, after a pause. “But I did try. I really tried. For months. And he just pushed me away… You know, you can only actually help someone who wants to be helped,” she said.

Related Characters: Alicia Dewar (Lissa) (speaker), Louisa (Lou) Clark, Will Traynor
Page Number: 57
Explanation and Analysis:

I could well imagine Will pushing her away. But surely if you loved someone it was your job to stick with him? To help him through the depression? In sickness and in health, and all that?

Related Characters: Louisa (Lou) Clark (speaker), Will Traynor, Alicia Dewar (Lissa)
Page Number: 61
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 6 Quotes

Treena was the reader. It was almost as if by picking up a book I felt like I was invading her patch. I thought about her and Thomas disappearing to the university and realized I still didn’t know whether it made me feel happy or sad – or something a bit complicated in between.

Related Characters: Louisa (Lou) Clark (speaker), Katrina (Treena) Clark, Thomas Clark
Page Number: 90-91
Explanation and Analysis:

“I have never found a pair of tights I loved like that again. They don’t do them anymore. Or if they do, they don’t make them for grown women.”
“Strange, that,”
“Oh, you can mock. Didn’t you ever love anything that much?”

Related Characters: Louisa (Lou) Clark (speaker), Will Traynor (speaker)
Related Symbols: Lou’s Bumblebee Tights
Page Number: 96
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 7 Quotes

Patrick had never minded the fact that I dressed “inventively,” as he put it. But what if he hadn’t been entirely truthful? Patrick’s job, his whole social life, now revolved around the control of flesh – taming it, reducing it, honing it. What if, faced with those tight little track-suited bottoms, my own suddenly seems wanting? What if my curves, which I had always thought of as pleasantly voluptuous, now seemed doughy to his exacting eyes?

Related Characters: Louisa (Lou) Clark (speaker), Patrick
Page Number: 102
Explanation and Analysis:

“You’re twenty-six years old, Clark. You should be out there, claiming the world as your own, getting in trouble in bars, showing off your strange wardrobe to dodgy men…”
“I’m happy here,” I said.
“Well, you shouldn’t be.”

Related Characters: Louisa (Lou) Clark (speaker), Will Traynor (speaker)
Page Number: 108
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 11 Quotes

“If you’d bothered to ask me, Clark, if you’d bothered to consult me just once about this so-called fun outing of ours, I could have told you. I hate horses, and horse racing. Always have. But you didn’t bother to ask me. You decided what you thought you’d like me to do, and you went ahead and did it. You did what everyone else does. You decided for me.”

Related Characters: Will Traynor (speaker), Louisa (Lou) Clark
Page Number: 171
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 12 Quotes

“I just… want to be a man who has been to a concert with a girl in a red dress. Just a few minutes more.” …
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.

Related Characters: Louisa (Lou) Clark (speaker), Will Traynor (speaker)
Page Number: 185
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 13 Quotes

…Granddad was picking at his plate with greedy delight, letting out what we called his “food noises” – little grunts and murmurs of pleasure.
“Delicious salmon,” Will said to my mother. “Really lovely flavor.”

Related Characters: Louisa (Lou) Clark (speaker), Will Traynor (speaker), Granddad
Page Number: 197
Explanation and Analysis:

I ran out of the room and pulled on a pair in the hallway. I pointed a toe, admiring the silliness of them. I don’t think a present had ever made me so happy in my life.
I walked back in. Will let out a small cheer. Granddad banged his hands on the table. Mum and Dad burst out laughing. Patrick just stared.

Related Characters: Louisa (Lou) Clark (speaker), Will Traynor, Patrick, Granddad
Related Symbols: Lou’s Bumblebee Tights
Page Number: 202
Explanation and Analysis:

Now he was just Will – maddening, mercurial, clever, funny Will – who patronized me and liked to play Professor Higgins to my Eliza Doolittle. His body was just a part of the whole package, a thing to be dealt with, at intervals, before we got back to the talking. It had become, I supposed, the least interesting part of him.

Related Characters: Louisa (Lou) Clark (speaker), Will Traynor
Page Number: 204
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 16 Quotes

It had become a kind of specter for me, the airless little room with no windows. The thought of sleeping in there again made my chest feel tight. I was twenty-seven years old. I was the main earner of the family. I could not sleep in what was essentially a cupboard.

Related Characters: Louisa (Lou) Clark (speaker)
Page Number: 241-242
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 17 Quotes

I thought of my parents, my sister with her big new life. Mine was to be the small life, my ambitions the petty ones. I glanced over at the maze, at its dark, dense box hedging. I was being ridiculous. Perhaps I had been behaving ridiculously for years. It was all over, after all. And I was moving on.

Related Characters: Louisa (Lou) Clark (speaker), Will Traynor, Katrina (Treena) Clark
Related Symbols: The Maze
Page Number: 269
Explanation and Analysis:

“Ultimately, they want to look on the bright side. They need me to look on the bright side… You, Clark,” he looked down at his hands, “are the only person I have felt able to talk to since I ended up in this bloody thing.”

Related Characters: Louisa (Lou) Clark (speaker), Will Traynor (speaker)
Page Number: 275
Explanation and Analysis:

“Some mistakes… just have greater consequences than others. But you don’t have to let that night be the thing that defines you.”
I felt his head still pressed against mine.
“You, Clark, have the choice not to let that happen.”

Related Characters: Will Traynor (speaker), Louisa (Lou) Clark
Page Number: 276
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 18 Quotes

I wanted to tell him that he was too good for that silly caramel woman, no matter what appearances might suggest, and that… I didn’t know what else I wanted to say. I just wanted to make it better. “You okay?” I said, as I caught up. The bottom line was, it should have been him.

Related Characters: Louisa (Lou) Clark (speaker), Will Traynor, Alicia Dewar (Lissa)
Page Number: 284
Explanation and Analysis:

“Louisa is one of the smartest people I know, but I can’t make her see her own possibilities.”
Mary Rawlinson gave him a sharp look. “Don’t patronize her, dear. She’s quite capable of answering for herself.” I blinked. “I rather think that you of all people should know that,” she added.

Related Characters: Louisa (Lou) Clark (speaker), Will Traynor (speaker), Mary Rawlinson (speaker)
Page Number: 289
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 20 Quotes

“Well, this is actual life or death, after all, and you’re locked into this man’s life every day, locked into his weird secret. That’s got to create a kind of false intimacy. Either that or you’re getting some weird Florence Nightingale complex.”

Related Characters: Katrina (Treena) Clark (speaker), Louisa (Lou) Clark, Will Traynor
Page Number: 315
Explanation and Analysis:

“It feels like I might be running, but I feel like I’m permanently just a little bit behind the rest of the field. I feel like…” He took a deep breath, as if he were trying to compose himself. “I feel like there’s something bad around the bend, and everyone else seems to know what it is except me.”

Related Characters: Patrick (speaker), Louisa (Lou) Clark
Page Number: 320
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 21 Quotes

I knew it, and Camilla knew it. Even if neither of us would admit it to ourselves. Only on my son’s death would I be free to live the life of my choosing.

Related Characters: Steven Traynor (speaker), Will Traynor, Camilla Traynor
Page Number: 327
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 23 Quotes

I know this isn’t a conventional love story. I know there are all sorts of reasons I shouldn’t even be saying what I am. But I love you. I do. I knew it even when I left Patrick. And I think you might even love me a little bit.

Related Characters: Louisa (Lou) Clark (speaker), Will Traynor, Patrick
Page Number: 359
Explanation and Analysis:

“Well, you don’t have to let that… that chair define you.”
“But it does define me, Clark. You don’t know me, not really. You never saw me before this thing. I loved my life, Clark. Really loved it… I led a big life.” His voice had lifted now. “I am not designed to exist in this thing – and yet for all intents and purposes it is now the thing that defines me.”

Related Characters: Louisa (Lou) Clark (speaker), Will Traynor (speaker)
Page Number: 361
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 25 Quotes

I couldn’t imagine crying over anyone I’d been with. The only equivalent was if I thought about Thomas waiting to die in some strange country, and as soon as that thought came to mind it made something inside me actually flip over, it was so hideous. So I stuck that in the back of my mental filing cabinet too, under the drawer labeled: unthinkable.

Related Characters: Katrina (Treena) Clark (speaker), Louisa (Lou) Clark, Will Traynor, Thomas Clark
Page Number: 383
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 26 Quotes

Mum? I owe Will. I owe it to him to go. Who do you think got me to apply to college? Who do you think encouraged me to make something of myself, to travel places, to have ambitions? Who changed the way I think about everything? About myself even? Will did. I’ve done more, lived more, in the last six months than in the last twenty-seven years of my life.

Related Characters: Louisa (Lou) Clark (speaker), Will Traynor, Josie Clark (Lou’s Mom)
Page Number: 330
Explanation and Analysis:

It’s not my choice. It’s not the choice of most of us on this board. I love my life, even if I wish it was different…If he is determined, if he really can’t see a way of things being better for him, then I guess the best thing you can do is just be there. You don’t have to think he’s right. But you do have to be there.

Related Characters: Ritchie (speaker), Louisa (Lou) Clark, Will Traynor
Page Number: 395
Explanation and Analysis:
Epilogue Quotes

Push yourself. Don’t settle. Wear those stripey legs with pride… you are scored on my heart, Clark. You were from the first day you walked in, with your ridiculous clothes and your bad jokes and your complete inability to ever hide a single thing you felt… Don’t think of me too often. I don’t want to think of you getting all maudlin. Just live well. Just live.

Related Characters: Will Traynor (speaker), Louisa (Lou) Clark
Related Symbols: Lou’s Bumblebee Tights
Page Number: 409
Explanation and Analysis:
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