Top 100 David Nicholls Quotes
#1. 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.
David Nicholls
#3. 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
#4. 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.
David Nicholls
#5. The crucial thing about an education is the opportunity tat it brings, the doors it opens, because otherwise knowledge, in and of itself, is a blind alley
David Nicholls
#6. Until now travel had always been a fraught affair. Each year until she was sixteen, it had been two weeks fighting with her sister in a caravan in Filey while her parents drank steadily and looked out at the rain, a sort of harsh experiment in the limits of human proximity.
David Nicholls
#7. 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.
David Nicholls
#8. 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
#9. And once again Dexter is struck by how easy conversation can be when no-one is in their right mind
David Nicholls
#10. 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.
David Nicholls
#11. I love that sound,' he mumbled into her hair. 'Blackbirds at dawn.'
'I hate it. Makes me think I've done something I'll regret.
David Nicholls
#12. I considered the concept of "oversharing", and what undersharing might be, and whether it was ever possible to settle on something in between.
David Nicholls
#13. You're gorgeous, you old hag, and 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
David Nicholls
#14. She made you decent, and in return you made her so happy
David Nicholls
#15. He could feel her laughter against his chest, and at that moment he thought that there was no better feeling than making Emma Morley laugh.
David Nicholls
#16. But i hate this date, and will always hate this day every year fromnow on whenever it comes around
David Nicholls
#17. Okay, well I think the programme is like being screamed at for an hour by a drunk with a strobe-light, but like I said
David Nicholls
#18. But they had also settled into the maddening familiarity of friendship; maddening for her at least.
David Nicholls
#19. A sense that finally, finally something good was about to happen to me. I felt the proximity of change, and I had wanted more than anything for something in my life to change. Is it still possible to feel like that, I wonder? Or does it only happen to us once?
David Nicholls
#20. When I was an actor, I worked with lots of men who had a bit of success early on, who were very good looking, who suddenly made a bit of money and who felt no embarrassment - and nor should they have done - about having a good time.
David Nicholls
#21. Why can't you just love me? Why can't you just be in love with me?
David Nicholls
#22. Were helping build capability and capacity in the new Iraqi Navy
David Nicholls
#23. He wonders if he still might tell her that he loves her or, more tentatively, that he 'thinks he might be in love with her', which is both more touching and easier to back out of.
David Nicholls
#24. Who's he seeing now then?"
"No idea. They're like funfair goldfish; no point giving them names, they never last that long.
David Nicholls
#25. The enemy, self-consciousness, is creeping up on them and Gibbsy or Biggsy is the first to crack, declaring that the music is shit and everyone stops dancing immediately as if a spell has been broken.
David Nicholls
#26. She liked to 'leave dishes to soak', an act of self-deception that I've always abhorred.
David Nicholls
#27. grief is as much regret for what we have never had as sorrow for what we have lost. As
David Nicholls
#28. David Holdaway was my stage name. I was an actor for about eight years in the '90s. I had to change my name because there was another David Nicholls, and I thought if I changed it to my mother's name, she'd be touched.
David Nicholls
#29. Well, in the first flush of love, if someone tells you to read something then you damn well read it [ ... ]
David Nicholls
#30. At some point you'll have to get serious about life.
David Nicholls
#31. Just kidding' was exactly what people wrote when they meant every word.
David Nicholls
#32. Our biographies involve each other so intrinsically now that we're both on nearly every page.
David Nicholls
#33. 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
#34. But the thing about Literature is, well, basically it encapsulates all the disciplines - it's history, philosophy, politics, sexual politics, sociology, psychology, linguistics, science. Literature is mankind's organised response to the world around him, or her.
David Nicholls
#35. Suki is the nation's ideal girlfriend, a woman for whom bubbliness is a way of life, verging on a disorder.
David Nicholls
#36. If there's anything I'm keen to get better at in my writing, then it's the writing of prose as opposed to the writing of dialogue.
David Nicholls
#37. Grief is as much about regret for what you've never had as sadness for what you've lost.
David Nicholls
#38. I'm aware that couples tend to embellish 'how we met' folklore with all kinds of detail and significance. We shape and sentimentalise these first encounters into creation myths to reassure ourselves and our offspring that it was somehow 'meant to be'.
David Nicholls
#39. When we were ready we would take a walk, perhaps down to La Boqueria, the food market that we both loved,
David Nicholls
#40. Of course you should study whatever you want. The written appreciation and understanding of literature, or any kind of artistic endeavour, is absolutely central to a decent society. Why d'you think books are the first things that the fascists burn?
David Nicholls
#41. I really was a terrible actor. I did it for years in my twenties because it was like being at university again.
David Nicholls
#42. Find the thing you love, and do it with all your heart, to the absolute best of your ability, no matter what people say.
David Nicholls
#43. I worry sometimes that I'm a bit moralistic; always writing about men who are learning to grow up, not be so self-absorbed, selfish or badly behaved. I wonder if that's dull and liberal and wimpy? I should probably write something that celebrates wickedness.
David Nicholls
#44. It's hard to overestimate the teenage appetite for high drama ...
David Nicholls
#45. I know that for every reader who has lost the habit or can't find the time, there are people who've never enjoyed reading and question the value of literature, either as entertainment or education, or believe that a love of books, and of fiction in particular, is sentimental or frivolous.
David Nicholls
#46. And of course there is always joy in witnessing the joy of others
David Nicholls
#47. As a novelist, I'm incredibly lucky to make a living, but that doesn't mean that I don't lie awake at four o'clock in the morning, worrying.
David Nicholls
#48. She was reaching the limits of how much its possible to change a man
David Nicholls
#49. People change, no use getting sentimental about it. Move on, find someone else.
David Nicholls
#50. Keep the change," he smiled. Was there ever a more empowering phrase than "Keep the change"?
David Nicholls
#51. Whatever happens tomorrow, we had today; and I'll always remember it
David Nicholls
#52. I still find it absurdly difficult to concentrate on a novel if there's a phone or computer to hand; I have taken to locking them outside the room like noisy pets.
David Nicholls
#53. I'm inclined to think that, after a certain age, our tastes, instincts and inclinations harden like concrete.
David Nicholls
#54. 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.
David Nicholls
#55. And you stupid, stupid woman, stupid for caring, stupid for thinking that he cared.
David Nicholls
#56. These days the nights and mornings have a tendency to bleed into one another.
David Nicholls
#57. An adaptation leads the cinema-goer to the original to find out what they're missing and if they already know the book, it can still illuminate a theme, a character, an idea.
David Nicholls
#58. 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
#60. Don't they appreciate how hard it is, staying decent, keeping your head on straight when so much is happening to you and your life is so full and eventfull?
David Nicholls
#61. 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
#62. Living in her University town felt like stayng on at a party that everyone else had left.
David Nicholls
#64. Maybe that's just what happens; you start out wanting to change the world through language, and end up thinking it's enough to tell a few jokes.
David Nicholls
#65. May cause drowsiness.' - the most beautiful words in the English language. Once it was 'do you have a t-shirt I can borrow?' Now it's 'may cause drowsiness.
David Nicholls
#66. Perhaps grief is as much regret for what we have never had as sorrow for what we have lost.
David Nicholls
#67. Most of the books and films I love walk a knife edge between romance and cynicism, and I wanted 'One Day' to stay on that line. I wanted it to be moving, but without being manipulative.
David Nicholls
#68. But how can you not like music? That's the same as not liking food! Or sex!
David Nicholls
#70. 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
#71. Things should look right, Fun; there should be a lot of fun and no more sadness than absolutely necessary
David Nicholls
#72. Be nice wont you?" "I am nice, I'm always nice." "But not too nice. I mean don't make a religion out of it, niceness.
David Nicholls
#73. Well I've fucked the olives. Not literally I might hasten to add!
David Nicholls
#74. I've been a compulsive reader for as long as I can remember.
David Nicholls
#75. There may well be a scientific paper to be written on why walking in an art gallery is so much more exhausting than, say, climbing Helvellyn. My guess is that it is something to do with the energy required to hold muscles in tension, combined with the mental exertion of wondering what to say.
David Nicholls
#76. Over-familiar, the music has become a kind of audio-Valium, background music rather than something I listen to actively and attentively. A gin and tonic after a long day. A shame, I think, because while each note remains the same, I used to hear them differently. It used to sound better.
David Nicholls
#77. 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.
David Nicholls
#78. The problem with all these fiercely individualistic girls was that they were all exactly the same.
David Nicholls
#79. 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
#80. You can't expect people to build their lives around you
David Nicholls
#81. Ah, solving that question Brings the priest and the doctor In their
David Nicholls
#82. Maybe they're in love."
"And is that what love looks like - all wet mouths and your skirt rucked up?"
"Sometines it is.
David Nicholls
#83. When will you stop trying to educate me, I wonder? Never I hope.
David Nicholls
#85. It's the face itself that I love, not that face at twenty-eight or thirty-four or forty-three. It's that face.
David Nicholls
#86. There seemed no reason why she shouldn't try writing something in between, but she was discovering once again that reading and writing were not the same - you couldn't just soak it up and then squeeze it out again.
David Nicholls
#87. This, I thought, is why we have comfort zones, because they are comfortable. What can possibly be gained by leaving them?
David Nicholls
#88. I have always been well liked, I think, always well regarded and respected, but having few enemies is not the same as having many friends, and there was no denying that I was, if not "lonely", more solitary than I'd hoped to be at that time.
David Nicholls
#89. 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
#90. Sometimes, when it is going badly, she wonders if what she believes to be a love of the written word is really just a fetish for stationary.
David Nicholls
#91. Light travels differently in a room that contains another person; it reflects and refracts so that even when she was silent or sleeping I knew that she was there.
David Nicholls
#92. She wondered if she was doomed to be one of those people who spend their lives trying things.
David Nicholls
#93. The fact was I loved my wife to a degree that I found impossible to express, and so rarely did.
David Nicholls
#94. And not for the first time she felt a reassuring shiver of dislike for him.
David Nicholls
#95. Dads had favourite armchairs in which they sat like starship captains, issuing orders and receiving cups of tea and shouting at the news without fear of contradiction.
David Nicholls
#96. Why, I wondered, did people seek out portrayals of the very experiences that, in real life, would send them mad with despair? Shouldn't art be an escape, a laugh, a comfort, a thrill?
David Nicholls
#97. ... and Emma felt another small portion of her soul fall away.
David Nicholls
#98. [He] didn't like to think of himself as vain, but there were definitely times when he wished there was someone on hand to take his photograph.
David Nicholls
#99. Other people's sex lives are a little like other people's holidays: you're glad that they had fun but you weren't there and don't necessarily want to see the photos.
David Nicholls
#100. But the trouble with living in the moment is that the moment passes. Impulse and spontaneity take no account of the longer term, of responsibilities and obligations, debts to be paid, promises to fulfil. I
David Nicholls
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