Home > Work > This Time Next Year
1 " Money isn’t everything. "
― Sophie Cousens , This Time Next Year
2 " I find places like this so packed with memories. Visiting them can be like opening a memory jar. You take off the lid and the smells and sounds of a place hit you, unlocking things folded away deep in your brain. "
3 " Don't cry about something you wouldn't cry about in five years' time," she once told Minnie. "And swim—swim when you can." Those were her two pieces of life advice. "
4 " An orange carpet of leaves covered the footpaths and a crisp, low light shone through the tangle of tree boughs above her head. She picked up a perfect red leaf from the ground, examining the intricate pattern of vessels mapping its thin surface. So beautiful, yet only created to last such a short time before its role on this planet was over, and it would decay into mulch. "
5 " Be a good companion to yourself and you will never be lonely. "
6 " Life is change -- if nothing's changing, you aren't living. "
7 " P.S. This book was written in a pre-COVID world. The 2020 of Minnie and Quinn’s world now exists only in some parallel universe. Whatever the year ahead might bring for us all, let’s keep reading. Books free us from isolation. Stories unite us. We’ve all had to play in one-player mode for a while—but we’re all still in this game together. "
8 " I don't think the scale of other people's problems make your own any easier to live with. "
9 " If you kiss a man and he runs a mile, he’s no good. Life is full of times you have to turn toward the storm, and life brings many storms. Sick children, parents dying, cancer, just the challenge of building a life together and not driving each other completely nuts. You need a man who’ll turn in to the storm with you when it comes, doesn’t she, Clare? "
10 " Quinn shrugged. “Better to be hated for what you are than loved for what you’re not. "
11 " Minnie, you were like this light coming into my life - you dazzle me. But your light also made me see all these shadows in my own life, shadows I finally realized I had to deal with. "
12 " When I meet the right man, he will believe in romance; he will get that it's important. Life can't just be about coupling up like yoghurts in a multi-pack. There's got to be more to it right? "
13 " Don’t cry about something you wouldn’t cry about in five years’ time, "
14 " She hardly recognized herself and yet, somehow, this person felt like the truest reflection of who she really was. "
15 " Be a good companion to yourself and you will never be lonely”—that had to be the aspiration. She wanted to fuel her own fire. If you got your fuel from men, they could leave, and you’d be left alone in the cold. "
16 " you let other people screw with your sense of self-worth too much. "
17 " But the biggest adventure of all has simply been being your friend. "
18 " We have a saying in France, ‘À chaque oiseau son nid est beau’—the bird loves his own nest. You don’t know any other nest, Minnie. You must spread your wings and learn to fly. "
19 " Life is change—if nothing’s changing, you aren’t living. "
20 " She saved the day, for someone else - as she always does. And I hope you'll take this the right way," Leila looked pensive for a moment, gazing slightly off focus into her champagne glass, "if I steal a Cooper family adage to say - all this, these wonderful people here today, this would never have happened to a Quinn Cooper. Some things are all Minnie, and I wouldn't have you any other way. "
