Cecelia Ahern Quotations

I always like to entertain, first of all, and if the readers take anything away from it that helps them with their own lives, well then, that is a bonus.

I always take a story that's kind of out there, like an urban myth. I take some possibility that people imagine, that they are familiar with, and try to turn it into a story.

I write about emotions - falling in and out of love, finding what you want to do, no matter where you are or who you are. I think that's why people feel connected.

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.

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.

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.

She would make facial expressions as though she were having conversations with people in her head.They seemed to turn into debates more often than not,judging by the activity on her forehead...It was almost the conversations in her head were loud enough to fill her silence.

It's not the job of this town to make me feel happy. It's not this town´s fault that I don't feel I fit in. It doesn't matter where you are in the world, because it's about where you are in your head. It's about the other world I inhabit. The world of dreams, hope, imagination, and memories. I'm happy up here, and because of that I'm happy up there too

.. then when the hurt goes, anger takes its place; when the anger runs out of system, loneliness steps in to take over. it's a never ending circle of emotions; every lost emotion being replaced by another.

I always pushed myself. Whenever I felt I needed to stop, I made myself run faster.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

If miracles had chemical equations then everyone would believe.

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

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.

My box bedroom can only fit a bed and a wardrobe but it was my whole world. My only personal space to think and dream, to cry and laugh and wait until I became old enough to do all the things I wasn't allowed to do.

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.

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.

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.

I don't know why men like to barbecue so much. Maybe its the only thing they can cook. Or maybe they're just closet pyromaniacs.

Every single time you crossed over for me and met me on my side. I realize now, I don't think I ever met you in the middle. And I don't think I ever once said that you for that.

Seeming and being are not one and the same.

I used to think that it was better to have too much than too little, but now I think if the too much was never supposed to be yours, you should just take what is yours and give the rest back.

We had come here to have a break from thoughts and the hard work that came with the constant interaction with idiots. Or at least people we considered idiots because they were not mind readers and we had to, patiently, use polite words to explain things that we were thinking when really inside we were fighting the urge to take their heads in our hands and softly and repeatedly thud their foreheads off the wall.

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!

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?

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.

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.

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

They say a story loses something with each telling.

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.

After having my baby I felt like I'd been introduced to my life, I slowed down, I paid more attention to simple things, I addressed a few issues in my own life, I even got married, I looked at what was important and what wasn't, and so I used that experience for inspiration.

It's not about finding Mr Right, or that sort of conventional ending, but I do want my characters to have hope - and that's what I do with all my stories.

I just need to do something new.... I've got the big remote control of life in my hands, and I'm ready to start pushing some buttons.

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

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

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.

I lost my dad. He lost his tomorrows and I lost all the tomorrows with him. You could say that now, I appreciate them when they come. Now, I want to make them the best they can possibly be.

It’s not easy remembering the good times.

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

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.

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

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.

I never grew up thinking the goal in life was to be a millionaire. All the way through college, I had a part-time job. I worked hard to get the things that you need at that age.

I write human stories. I write about people. Not as a product of their environment. But from the stance that everybody is made of the same thing.

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

I always want my books to reach a positive point in the end.

I write my novels longhand. I love the feeling of writing; I love to see pen on paper. It feels more creative than typing, and it's a more visual process for me - I can picture the entire scene in my head and am merely writing what I see.

I would love to write a mystery - a romantic, funny mystery.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

Whenever I go to Germany I find that my readers have T-shirts with my book covers printed on them. They come to all the events, they have gifts and they come with their families. They are always very open to sharing their personal stories.

I think I need to face what I could have been in order to understand and accept what I am.

Alex: Rosie, I wanted you to be the first person to no that I’ve decided to become a heart surgeon! Rosie: Cool, does it pay well? Alex: Rosie, it’s not about the money. Rosie: Where I come from, it’s all about the money. Probably because I don’t have any.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

I can’t even think about what life “could have been” like in Boston, without crying. It’s like deja-vu, I don’t think me and Boston were ever meant to be.

I felt that my views and philosophies had been changed overnight. The philosophies that i had gladly carved in stone, recited and danced upon.

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

Once again, I don’t quite know where I’m headed Steph. It seems that every few years I’m shoveling up the pieces of my life and starting from scratch all over. No matter what I do or how hard I try I can’t seem to reach the dizzy heights of happiness, success, and security, like so many people do. And I’m not talking about becoming a millionaire and living happily ever after. I just mean reaching a point in my life that I can stop what I’m doing, take a look around me, breathe a sigh of relief, and think “I’m where I want to be now.

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.

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.

I love it here in Boston and I love studying medicine. But it’s not home. Dublin is home. Being back with you felt like home. I miss my best friend. I’ve met some great guys here, but I didn’t grow up with any of them playing cops and robbers in my back garden. I don’t feel like they are real friends. I haven’t kicked them in the shins, stayed up all night on Santa watch with them, hung from trees pretending to be monkeys, played hotel, or laughed my heart out as their stomachs were pumped. It’s kind of hard to beat that.

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.

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.

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.

well i think its quite obvious that if you're going to rely on something to carry your wishes, you might as well know where exactly it has come from and where it intends on going

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.

And that is how Goodwin problems were always fixed. Fix them on the surface but don't go to the root, always ignoring the elephant in the room. I think that morning was when I realized I'd grown up with an elephant in every room of my life. It was practically our family pet.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Twice we stood beside each other at the altar, Rosie. Twice. And twice we got it wrong. I needed you to be there for my wedding day but I was too stupid to see that I needed you to be the reason for my wedding day. But we got it all wrong.

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

She was tired of hugging pillows, counting on blankets for warmth, and reliving romantic moments only in her dreams. She was tired of hoping that every day would hurry so she could get on to the next. Hoping that it would be a better day, an easier day. But it never was. Worked, paid the bills, and went to bed but never slept. Each morning the weight on her shoulders got heavier and heavier and each morning she wished for night to fall quickly so she could return to her bed to hug her pillows and wrap herself in the warmth of her blankets.

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.

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.

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

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

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.