David Nicholls (writer) - One Day (2009)

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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.

David Nicholls
Just kidding' was exactly what people wrote when they meant every word.

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

David Nicholls
She used to pride herself on her refusal to see two sides of an argument, but increasingly she accepts that issues are more ambiguous and complicated than she once thought.

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

David Nicholls
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?

David Nicholls
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.

David Nicholls
Dexter, I love you so much. So, so much, and I probably always will. I just don't like you anymore. I'm sorry.

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

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

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
Failure and unhappiness is easier because you can make a joke out of it.

David Nicholls
She was discovering once again that reading and writing were not the same — you couldn't just soak it up then squeeze it out again.

David Nicholls
And you stupid, stupid woman, stupid for caring, stupid for thinking that he cared.

David Nicholls
You've got to stop letting women slip drugs into your mouth, Dex, it's unhygienic. And dangerous. One day it'll be a cyanide capsule.

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

David Nicholls
You start out wanting to change the world through language, and end up thinking it's enough to tell a few good jokes.

David Nicholls
I am not up to this. I am not capable. I thought I would be, but I'm not. Some part of me is missing, and I cannot do this.

David Nicholls
It's hard to overestimate the teenage appetite for high drama...

David Nicholls
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.

David Nicholls
I think you're amazing,' someone says to someone else, but it doesn't matter who, because they're all amazing really. People are amazing.

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

David Nicholls