David Nicholls Quotes (78 Quotes)

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.

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?

She could see the words Calvin Klein against the brown hair on the small of his back and it occurred to her that this was probably not at all what Calvin Klein had in mind.

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

No matter how predictable, banal and listless the rest of my life might be, you can guarantee that there'll always be something interesting going on with my skin.

At some point you'll have to get serious about life.

He's laughing me into a stupor, she thought. I could heckle, I suppose, I could throw a bread roll at him, but he's eaten them all. 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? Eat a meal, go to bed, fall in love with me and I promise you years and years of top notch material like this?

She drinks pints of coffee and writes little observations and ideas for stories with her best fountain pen on the linen-white pages of expensive notebooks. Sometimes, when it's going badly, she wonders if what she believes to be a love of the written word is really just a fetish for stationery.

They have started to arrive. An endless cascade of luxuriously quilted envelopes, thumping onto the doormat. The wedding invitations.

They say the personal is political and it's certainly fair to say that, like her politics, Rebecca Epstein's kissing is radical, forthright and uncompromising.

Being a decent human being will require effort and energy…

I don't think there's anything we can do, is there? We either stop or we carry on.

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?

This is where it all begins. Everything starts here, today.

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.

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.

She had never been a proficient flirt. Her spasms of kittenish behaviour were graceless and inept, like normal conversation on roller skates. but the combination of the retsina and sun made Emma feel sentimental and light-headed. She reached for her roller skates.

This isn't a letter, it's a gift.

Call me sentimental, but there's no-one in the world that I'd like to see get dysentery more than 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 a firm resolution, one of the resolutions she was making almost daily these days. No more sleepovers, no more writing poetry, no more wasting time. Time to tidy up your life. Time to start again.

Time to tidy up your life. Time to start again.

Change lives through art maybe. Write beautifully. Cherish your friends, stay true to your principles, live passionately and fully and well. Experience new things. Love and be loved if at all possible. Eat sensibly. Stuff like that.

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

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

Today. This bright new day that awaits us

Alice doesn't seem to mind because she's laughing too, and biting her lip, all doe-eyed, and tossing her freshly washed hair, and Norton tosses his lovely, glossy hair back, and she tosses her hair in return, and he tosses his, and she tosses hers, and it;s like some mating ritual on a wildlife program.

Cuddling was for great aunts and teddy bears. Cuddling gave him cramp.

I'm trying to be inspiring! I'm trying to lift your grubby soul for the great adventure that lies ahead of you!

She realises that if she is to save the show she is going to have to improvise a rousing speech, one of the many Henry V moments that make up her working life.

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.

He's wearing his official university sweatshirt again, which puzzles me a little. I mean I'd sort of understand it more if it said Yale or Harvard or something, because then it would be a fashion choice. But why advertise the fact that you're at a university to all the other people who are at the university with you?

Do you think it's a conspiracy, people secretly ganging up to be nice to you?

Imagine staying awake all night not because you're worried about the future but because it's FUN

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

Who do you think you are, Jane Eyre? Grow up. Be sensible. Don't get carried away.

If she does have a failing, and it's obviously only a tiny one, it's that she doesn't seem particularly curious about other people, or me, anyway.

Don't keep fighting battles that are already lost.

In rare moments of self-doubt, Dexter had once worried that a lack of intellect might hold him back in life, but here was a job where confidence, energy, perhaps even a certain arrogance were all that mattered, all qualities that lay within his grasp.

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

Why can't you just love me? Why can't you just be in love with me?

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.

Emma was a shocking driver, simultaneously sloppy and petrified, and for the first fifty miles had been absent-mindedly driving with her spectacles on top of her contact lenses so that other traffic loomed menacingly out of nowhere like alien space cruisers.

Maybe we've grown out of each other.

Suki is the nation's ideal girlfriend, a woman for whom bubbliness is a way of life, verging on a disorder.

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

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.

Envy was just the tax you paid on success.

No Scrabble. More and more of his friends were playing it now, in a knowing ironic way, triple-word-score-craving freaks, but it seemed to him like a game designed expressly to make him feel stupid and bored.

The city had defeated her, just like they said it would. Like some overcrowded party, no one had noticed her arrival, and would notice if she left.