David Nicholls Quotes

“So - whatever happened to you?'
'Life. Life happened.”

“For some time now she has had the conviction that life is about to change if only because it must….”

“You can't throw away years of your life because it makes a funny anecdote.”

“Cherish your friends, stay true to your principles, live passionately and fully and well. Experience new things. Love and be loved, if you ever get the chance.”

“The problem with all these fiercely individualistic girls was that they were all exactly the same.”

“You can live your whole life not realizing that what you're looking for is right in front of you.”

“I love him, she thought. I'm just not in love with him and also I don't love him. I've tried, I've strained to love him but I can't. I am building a life with a man I don't love, and I don't know what to do about it.”

“Once you decide not to worry about that stuff anymore, dating and relationships and love and all that, it's like you're free to get on with real life.”

“… if I could give you just one gift ever for the rest of your life it would be this. Confidence. It would be the gift of Confidence. Either that or a scented candle.”

“As a matter of fact, I think there are more things important in life than "relationships.”

“Why can’t you just love me? Why can’t you just be in love with me?”

“I love you is an interesting phrase, in that apparently small alterations–taking away the I, adding a word like lots or loads–render it meaningless.”

“And it was at moments like this that she had to remind herself that she was in love with him, or had once been in love with him, a long time ago.”

“She glanced at the other diners, all of them going into their act, and thought is this what it all boils down to? Romantic love, is this all it is, a talent show?”

“Just kidding' was exactly what people wrote when they meant every word.”

“He wanted to live life in such a way that if a photograph were taken at random, it would be a cool photograph.”

“And then some days you wake up and everything's perfect.”

“I'm not the consolation prize, Dex. I'm not something you resort to. I happen to think I'm worth more than that.”

“I think reality is overrated.”

“You feel a little bit lost right now about what to do with your life, a bit rudderless and oarless and aimless but that’s okay… That’s alright because we’re all meant to be like that at twenty-four.”

“This is me.’" He handed her the precious scrap of paper. ‘Call me or I’ll call you, but one of us will call, yes? What I mean is it’s not a competition. You don’t lose if you phone first.”

“Oh you know me. I have no emotions. I'm a robot. Or a nun. A robot nun.”

“In eight years not a day has gone by when she hasn’t thought of him. She misses him and she wants him back. I want my best friend back, she thinks, because without him nothing is good and nothing is right.”

“And of course there is always joy in witnessing the joy of others.”

“Their friendship was like a wilted bunch of flowers that she insisted on topping up with water. Why not let it die instead?”

“Call me sentimental, but there's no-one in the world that I'd like to see get dysentery more than you”

“Better by far to be good and courageous and bold and to make difference. Not change the world exactly, but the bit around you.”

“If you're my friend I should be able to talk to you but I can't, and if I can't talk to you, well, what is the point of you? Of us?”

“She made you decent, and in return you made her so happy”

“Do you miss her?'
'Who? Emma? Of course. Every day. She was my best friend.”

“People change, no use getting sentimental about it. Move on, find someone else.”

“He's a better person when she's around, and isn't that what friends are for, to raise you up and keep you at your best?”

“Dont run before you can walk”

“Envy was just the tax you paid on success.”

“… Emma Morley wasn't such a paragon either: pretentious, petulant, lazy, speechifying, judgmental. Self-pitying, self righteous, self-important, all the selfs except self-confident, the quality that she had always needed the most.”

“She was reaching the limits of how much its possible to change a man”

“Today. This bright new day that awaits us”

“A moment passed, perhaps half a second when their faces said what they felt, and then Emma was smiling, laughing, her arms around his neck.”

“As the possibility of a relationship had faded, Emma had endeavored to harden herself to Dexter's indifference and these days a remark like this caused no more pain than, say, a tennis ball thrown sharply at the back of her head.”

“She shouldn't speak her thoughts; nothing good ever came of speaking your thoughts.”

“Whatever happens tomorrow, we've had today.”

“Things should look right, Fun; there should be a lot of fun and no more sadness than absolutely necessary”

“Maybe we've grown out of each other.”

“Don’t keep fighting battles that are already lost.”

“So do you think it's true what they say? About girls liking bastards?'
'He's not a bastard. He's an idiot.'
'Do girls like idiots then?”

“These days grief seems like walking on a frozen river; most of the time he feels safe enough, but there is always that danger that he will plunge through.”

“I'm just not prepared to be treated like this anymore.'
'Treated like what?'
She sighed, and it was a moment before she spoke. 'Like you always want to be somewhere else, with someone else.”

“From an evolutionary point of view, most emotions - fear, desire, anger - serve some practical purpose, but nostalgia is a useless, futile thing because it is a longing for something that is permanently lost….”

“In the future, I'll be braver, she told herself. In the future, I will always speak my mind, eloquently, passionately.”

“And you stupid, stupid woman, stupid for caring, stupid for thinking that he cared.”

“All young people worry about things, it's a natural and inevitable part of growing up, and at the age of sixteen my greatest anxiety in life was that I'd never again achieve anything as good, or pure, or noble, or true, as my O-level results.”

“Salmon. Salmon, salmon, salmon, salmon. I eat so much salmon at these weddings, twice a year I get this urge to swim upstream.”

“She wondered if she was doomed to be one of those people who spend their lives trying things.”

“… and once again Dexter is struck by how easy conversation can be when no-one is in their right mind”

“These days the nights and mornings have a tendency to bleed into one another.”

“This isn't a letter, it's a gift.”

“We're not ourselves, are we? I'm certainly not myself, not anymore. And you're not either. You don't seem yourself. Not as I remember you.”

“As new dawns go, this one is depressingly like the old dawn.”

“What must that be like? To be admired before you’ve even said a word, to be desired two or three hundred times a day by people who have absolutely no idea what you’re like?”

“Call me or I’ll call you, but one of us will call, yes? What I mean is it’s not a competition. You don’t lose I you phone first.”

“The future rose up ahead of her, a succession of empty days, each more daunting and unknowable than the one before her.”

“But at the best of times she feels like a character in a Muriel Spark novel — independent, bookish, sharp-minded, secretly romantic.”

“The true writer, the born writer, will scribble words on scraps of litter, the back of a bus tickets, on the wall of a cell.”

“No, friends were like clothes: fine while they lasted but eventually they wore thin or you grew out of them.”

“Was it the happiest day of our lives? Probably not, if only because the truly happy days tend not to involve so much organisation, are rarely so public or so expensive. The happy ones sneak up, unexpected.”