David Nicholls (writer) Quotes

94 Sourced Quotes

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.

David Nicholls
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?

David Nicholls
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.

David Nicholls
For his thirtieth birthday he had filled a whole night-club off Regent Street; people had been queuing on the pavement to get in. The SIM card of his mobile phone in his pocket was overflowing with telephone numbers of all the hundreds of people he had met in the last ten years, and yet the only person he had ever wanted to talk to in all that time was standing now in the very next room.

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

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

David Nicholls
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?

David Nicholls
And once again Dexter is struck by how easy conversation can be when no-one is in their right mind

David Nicholls
You know what i can't understand? You have all these people telling you all the time how great you are, smart and funny and talented and all that, i mean endlessly, i've been telling you for years. So why don't you believe it? why do you think people say that stuff, Em? Do you think it's a conspiracy, people secretly ganging up to be nice about you?

David Nicholls
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.

David Nicholls
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?

David Nicholls
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.

David Nicholls
Surprised all over again at how very comforting very bad food can be.

David Nicholls
All his words and actions would now be fit for his daughter's ears and eyes. Life would be lived as if under [her] constant scrutiny. He would never do anything that might cause her pain or anxiety or embarrassment and there would be nothing, absolutely nothing in his life to be ashamed of anymore.

David Nicholls
And of course there is always joy in witnessing the joy of others

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

David Nicholls
The attraction of a life devoted to sensation, pleasure and self would probably wear thin one day, but there was still plenty of time for that yet.

David Nicholls
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.

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

David Nicholls
The sad fact is that I love Dickens and Donne and Keats and Eliot and Forster and Conrad and Fitzgerald and Kafka and Wilde and Orwell and Waugh and Marvell and Greene and Sterne and Shakespeare and Webster and Swift and Yeats and Joyce and Hardy, really, really love them. It's just that they don't love me back.

David Nicholls
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.

David Nicholls
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.

David Nicholls
People change, no use getting sentimental about it. Move on, find someone else.

David Nicholls
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.

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

David Nicholls
Sometimes I wish that I hadn't learned how to crochet," I say, and Alice laughs. Obviously she thinks I'm joking, which is maybe for the best.

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

David Nicholls
But they had also settled into the maddening familiarity of friendship; maddening for her at least.

David Nicholls
She glanced across to where Tilly and her brand new husband were posing for photographs, Tilly fluttering a fan coquettishly in front of her face. 'Unfortunately I didn't realise there was a French Revolutionary theme.' 'The Marie-Antoinette thing?' said Dexter. 'Well at least we know there'll be cake.

David Nicholls
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.

David Nicholls