Jenny Downham quotes:

I'm here, Tess. I'm right here, holding your hand. Adam's here, too, he's sitting on the other side of the bed. And Cal. Mum's on her way, she'll be just a minute. We all love you, Tessa. We're all right here with you.

I wish I had a boyfriend. I wish he lived in the wardrobe on a coat hanger. Whenever I wanted, I could get him out and he'd look at me the way boys do in films, as if I'm beautiful.

Hold my hand. Don't let go.

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.

Bye, Tess. haunt me if you like. I don't mind.

As an actor I worked for seven years with a community theater company based in London. We used improvisation techniques to take stories to young people who wouldn't normally have access to them - in prisons, hospitals, young offender's units, youth clubs and housing estates.

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

Parents don't know their children at all.No one knows anyone, in fact.

It's a shame i can't be there myself - i like parties. Text me if you think of any good hymns!

If I learnt anything at all about terminal illness in my research, it's that the experience is different for everyone. I do believe that life becomes concentrated when it's boundaried and that death is the biggest boundary of all.

It's all right, Tessa, you can go. We love you. You can go now.' 'Why are you saying that?' 'She might need permission to die, Cal.' 'I don't want her to. She doesn't have my permission.

Keep breathing. Just keep doing it. It's easy. In and out.

I get a lot of letters, mostly from family members who have been affected by cancer rather than young people themselves. I reply to them all.

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.

Every seven years our bodies change, every cell. Every seven years, we disappear.

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.

The light is heart-breaking.

Don't pretend to care. I don't need you as an anesthetic.

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.

When my second child was born, I gave up acting - two young children out on the road was too difficult to manage. I'd always written, but began to do so with real commitment now that it was my only creative outlet. I used all my acting techniques to do it. I still do.

We make patterns, we share moments.

Do you want this to be a love story?

I like you," he said.He made it sound as if she was bound to disagree with him. She nodded. His face said he was telling her something very important.He said, "I mean it. Whatever happens, you have to believe that.

I love you. It hurts more than anything ever has, but I do. So don't you dare tell me I don't. Don't you ever say it again!

It was strange how words meant something when they came out of your mouth. Inside your head they were safe and silent, but once they were outside, people grabbed hold of them.

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.

Help me, Mikey, she wanted to say. I'm afraid. More afraid than you'd ever believe.' And he'd take her hand and they'd fly across the rooftops and up into space and sit on some planet and watch a double sunrise or maybe a star being born or some other event that no human had ever seen, her head on his shoulder, his arm around her. And she'd tell him everything.

I said I wouldn't leave her.

Dad, you played rounders with me, even though you hated it and wished I'd take up cricket. You learned how to keep a stamp collecion because I wanted to know. For hours you sat in hospitals and never, not once, complained. You brushed my hair like a mother should. You gave up work for me, friends for me, four years of your life for me. You never moaned. Hardly ever. You let me have Adam. You let me have my list. I was outrageous. Wanting, wanting so much. And you never said, 'That's enough. Stop now.

Every few years we disappear, Zoey. All our cells are replaced by others. Not a single bit of me is the same as when I was last in this room.

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.

She'll understand what I already know - that death surrounds us all. And it tastes like metal between your teeth.

I shrug him off. 'Can't you just go away?" There's a moment. It has a sound in it, as if something very small got broken.

I feel something very small growing inside me as I look at her, and I realize in one absolutely clear moment that I don't like her at all. 'You know what?' I say. 'Forget it. I'll do the list by myself.' She stands up, swings her stupid hair about and tries to look offended. It's a trick that works with guys, but it makes no difference to the way I feel about her.

The inside of the door is glossy white. A total re-paint. I touch it with my fingers, but it stays the same. It's so bright it makes the room waver at the edges. Every few years we disappear.

I made a fatal error thinking he could save me.

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.

The shops in High Street still have their metal grilles down, blank-eyed and sleeping. My name is scrawled across them all. I'm outside Ajay's newsagent's. I'm on the expensive shutters of the health food store. I'm massive on Handie's furniture shop, King's Chicken Joint and the Barbecue Cafe. I thread the pavement outside the bank and all the way to Mothercare. I've possessed the road and am a glistening circle at the roundabout.

And now he's down this for me. He's made me famous. He's put my name on the world.

And in bed, deep inside the building, are all the headaches that won't go away. The failed kidneys, the rashes, the ragged-edged moles, the lumps on the breast, the coughs that have turned nasty. In the Marie Curie Ward on the fourth floor are the kids with cancer. Their bodies secretly and slowly being consumed. And then there's the mortuary, where the dead lie in refrigerated drawers with name tags on their feet.

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

Is this how it is for everyone?' she whispered. 'No.' 'How do you know?' 'I just do. I've never felt this with anyone before.' 'Serious?' 'Serious. That isn't a line.' 'Kiss me,' she said. He did. Everywhere.

When I first saw Ellie, I knew it was her-- she was my fantasy. I didn't want it to be true, but every time I met her it was obvious, and the funny thing was that she was better than the fantasy, like I got more stuff than I'd imagined.

The last few weeks, it was as if someone had taken his life to pieces and let him see the way it worked.

I want you to be with me in the dark. To hold me. To keep loving me. To help me when I get scared. To come right to the edge and see what's there.

I didn't understand that when you make love, you actually do MAKE love. Stir things. Affect each other. The breath that escapes from me is dazzled. He breathes it in with a gasp.

If you want a girl to like you, you have to listen like a woman and love like a man.

Was this love? Because it hurt. It was like a bit of glass stuck somewhere important--his heart or his head, and it was throbbing.

She'd never in her whole life bunked school, smoked dope, or kissed a boy whose name she didn't know, and yet in the last few days, she'd done all these things.

There's a gang of boys on bikes blocking the road ahead. They've got their hoods up, cigarettes shielded. The sky's a really strange colour and there's hardly anyone else about. I slow right down. "What shall I do?" "Reverse," Zoey says. "They're not going to move." I wind down the window. "Oi!" I yell "Move your arses!" They turn languid, shift lazily to the edge of the road and grin as I blow kisses at them. Zoey looks stunned, "What's got into you?" "Nothing- I just haven't learned reversing yet.

Don't think you have to be good because you're the only one left. Be as bad as you like.

Sometimes if you want something badly enough, you can make it happen. If you miss someone so desperately that it wrecks your insides, you say their name over and over until you conjure then. It's called sympathetic magic and you just have to believe in it to make it work.

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.

I miss him as soon as he goes. When he isn't with me, I think I made him up.

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?

I don't think words reach people. Maybe nothing does

I mean it. Whatever happens, you have to believe that.

Nurses never tell you what they know. They're hired for their cheeriness and the thickness of their hair. They need to look alive and healthy, to give the patients something to aim for.

Life is made up of a series of moments, each one a journey to the end.

Every breath, every heartbeat, was one less until maybe things stopped hurting this much.

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

You changed the rules of the universe when you fell in love with the enemy.

She needed food. Diets didn't count in a crisis.

Humans are made from nuclear ash of dead stars

Her skin tasted expensive.

Then she says, "?I love you.' Like three drops of blood falling onto snow.

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

Cal says that humans are made from the nuclear ash of dead stars. He says that when I die, I'll return to dust, glitter,rain. If thats true, I want to be buried right here under this tree. Its roots will reach into the soft mess of my body and suck me dry. I'll be re-formed as apple blossom. I'll drift down in the spring like confetti and cling to my family's shoes. They'll carry me in their pockets to help them sleep. What dreams will they have then?

No, really. I free you.' I don't want to be free.

It's as if a child with a brush and too much enthusiasm has been set free with a tin of black paint inside me.

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

Are you afraid, Tessa?

Three points for the dead slowly prising open the lids of their coffins. They want to hunt the living. They can't stop. Their throats have turned to liquid and their fingers glint under the weak autumn sun.

It's utterly beautiful not to know my own edges.

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

. . . my bones they'll burn or bury. It'll be my death.

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

Moments. All gathering towards this one.

All I know is that I have two choices "? stay wrapped in blankets and get on with dying, or get the list back together and get on with living.

It's really going to happen. I really won't ever go back to school. Not ever. I'll never be famous or leave anything worthwhile behind. I'll never go to college or have a job. I won't see my brother grow up. I won't travel, never earn money, never drive, never fall in love or leave home or get my own house. It's really, really true. A thought stabs up, growing from my toes and ripping through me, until it stifles everything else and becomes the only thing I'm thinking. It fills me up like a silent scream.

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

I'm me and you're you, and all of them out there are them. And we're all so different and equally unimportant.

I don't want to go into a fridge at an undertaker's. I want you to keep me at home until the funeral. Please can someone sit with me in case I get lonely? I promise not to scare you.

Should we say something?' Cal asks. "?Goodbye, bird?' I suggest. He nods. "?Goodbye, bird. Thank you for coming. And good luck.

Statement: A girl and a boy jump into a river. The boy swims over to the girl and says, "God, it's cold." Question: What's the probability they will kiss?

That slow smile again. I love that smile! DId I think he was ugly just now? No, his face is transformed.

I lean back on the pillows and look at the corners of the room. When I was a kid, I always wanted to live on the ceiling - it looked so clean and uncluttered, like the top of a cake.

I've always wanted to be a cat. Warm and domesticated when you want to be, wild when you don't.

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.

But all that is warm will go cold. My ears will fall off and my eyes will melt. My mouth will be clamped shut. My lips will turn to glue. ...No taste or smell or touch or sound.Nothing to look at. Total emptiness for ever.