David Nicholls citations

Page 3

“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.”

“As soon as she'd met him at the arrivals gate on his return from Thailand, lithe and brown and shaven-headed, she knew that there was no chance of a relationship between them. Too much had happened to him, too little had happened to her.”

“Being a decent human being will require effort and energy…”

“…and you smile back and try not to think about the fact that you have nothing, absolutely nothing, to say to each other.”

“I had always been led to believe that ageing was a slow and gradual process, the creep of a glacier. Now I realise that it happens in a rush, like snow falling off a roof.”

“Happyish. Well, happyish isn't so bad.'
'It's the most we can hope for.”

“… 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.”

“perhaps grief is as much regret for what we have never had as sorrow for what we have lost.”

“Everything was fine, and she had the rare, new sensation of being exactly where she wanted to be.”

“I want my best friend back, she thinks, because without him nothing is good and nothing is right.”

“The problem with telling people that they can do anything they want to do is that it is objectively, factually inaccurate. Otherwise the whole world would just be ballet dancers and pop stars.”

“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.”