Jenny Downham Quotes

43 Sourced Quotes

I want the people I love to get up and speak about me, and even if you cry it'll be OK. I want you to say honest things.

Jenny Downham
I can see inside planes!' he yells. 'Come and look!' It's difficult climbing in a mini dress...I haul myself up even though my arms ache. I want to see inside planes too. I want to watch the wind and catch birds in my fist.

Jenny Downham
I want to die in my own way. It's my illness, my death, my choice. This is what saying yes means.

Jenny Downham
Death straps me to the hospital bed, claws its way onto my chest and sits there.I didn't know it would hurt this much. I didn't know that everything good that's ever happened in my life would be emptied out by it.

Jenny Downham
Her face crashes. She hasn't dealt with a single transfusion or lumbar puncture. She wasn't allowed near me for the bone-marrow transplant, but she could have been there for any number of diagnoses, and wasn't. Even her promises to visit more often have faded away with Christmas. It's her turn to taste some reality.

Jenny Downham
Like a tree losing its leaves. I forget even the thing I was thinking.

Jenny Downham
When I was four I almost fell down the shaft of a tin mine and when I was five the car rolled over on the motorway and when I was seven we went on holiday and the gas ring blew out in the caravan and nobody noticed I've been dying all my life

Jenny Downham
A little bird moves a mountain of sand one grain at a time it picks up one grain every million years and when the mountain has been moved the bird puts it all back again and that's how long eternity is and that's a very long time to be dead

Jenny Downham
Maybe you should say goodbye, Cal.' 'No.' 'It might be important.' 'It might make her die.

Jenny Downham
Instructions for Adam Look after no one except yourself. Go to university and make lots of friends and get drunk. Forget your door keyes. Laugh. Eat pot-noodles for breakfast. Miss lectures. Be irresponsible.

Jenny Downham
I love you. I love you. I send this message through my fingers and into his, up his arm and into his heart. Hear me. I love you. And I'm sorry to leave you.

Jenny Downham
It hurts and hurts to have him this close. I feel sick with it.

Jenny Downham
We make patterns, we share moments. Sometimes, I think I'm the only one to see it.

Jenny Downham
I imagine horses in the engine, their manes flying, their breaths steaming, their nostrils flaring as they gallop.

Jenny Downham
Adam strokes my head, my face, he kisses my tears. We are blessed. Let them all go. The sound of a bird flying low across the garden. Then nothing. Nothing. A cloud passes. Nothing again. Light falls through the window, falls onto me, into me. Moments. All gathering towards this one.

Jenny Downham
I'm here. Soon I won't be. Zoey's baby is here. Its pulse tick-ticking. Soon it won't be. And when Zoey comes out of that room, having signed on the dotted line, she'll be different. She'll understand what I already know- that death surrounds us all. And it tastes like metal between you teeth.

Jenny Downham
There's a terrible stillness. I notice a small tear in the wallpaper above her shoulder. I notice finger marks grimed on the light switch. Somewhere down in the house, a door opens and shuts. As Zoey turns to face me, I realize that life is made up of a series of moments, each one a journey to the end.

Jenny Downham
Maybe I'll come back as somebody else. I'll be the wild-haired girl Adam meets in his first week at university. 'Hi, are you on the horticultural course as well?

Jenny Downham