Quotes from 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.

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

Faint-hearted as usual, she had left it too late. In the future, I'll be braver, she told herself. In the future, I will always speak my mind, eloquently, passionately.

He hadn't been this nervous since the last disastrous night at the improv, and he firmly told himself to calm down as he blotted at the tablecloth, glancing upwards to see Emma wriggling out of her summer jacket, pushing her shoulders back and her chest forward in that way that women do without realising the ache they cause.

A él le habían pasado demasiadas cosas, y a ella demasiado pocas.

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. It wasn't much in the way of a guiding philosophy, and not one your could share, least of all with this man, but it was what she believed.

It had sometimes puzzled me why falling in love should be regarded as some wondrous event, accompanied by soaring strings, when it so often ended in humiliation, despair or acts of awful cruelty.

What about damp? What about flooding? Wouldn't it make sense to have a little lawn or garden as a sort of buffer zone between the house and the water? But then it wouldn't be Venice, said Connie's voice in my head. Then it would be Staines.

Anyway, that's why you do it. Not to be famous, just to be good. To do good work. Find the thing you really love doing, and do it to the best of your ability.

And there it was. She'd said it and now I could say it back, the most banal and brilliant exchange of dialogue, which we'd repeat, over and over, for just as long as we meant it.

He had one of those faces where you were aware of the bones beneath the skin, as if even his bare skull would be attractive.

Our biographies involve each other so intrinsically now that we're both on nearly every page. We know the answers because we were there, and so curiosity becomes hard to maintain; replaced, I suppose, by nostalgia.

No.' She took my hand. 'Let's make a French exit.' 'What's a French exit?' 'It's when you leave without saying goodbye.' 'I've never heard that before.' A French exit; no thank you for having me, no I've had a lovely time. To just walk away, cool and aloof. I wondered if I could.

Just kidding' was exactly what people wrote when they meant every word of it.

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. (Love and be loved, if you ever get the chance.)

Our biographies involve each other so intrinsically now that we're both on nearly every page. We know the answers because we were there, and so curiosity becomes hard to maintain; replaced, I suppose, by nostalgia.

that if you love someone you must set them free. Well, that's just nonsense. If you love someone, you bind them to you with heavy metal chains.

Here people cycled with a reckless swagger, talking on the phone and eating breakfast.

and it occurred to me then, just as it does now, that the greatest lie that age tells about youth is that it's somehow free of care, worry or fear.

to be some exceptional, a Cartier-Bresson, a Capa or a Brandt, would require toil, rejection & struggle

Maybe they're in love." "And is that what love looks like - all wet mouths and your skirt rucked up?" "Sometines it is.

grief is as much about regret for what you've never had as sadness for what you've lost. Anyway, we got through it somehow.

to become exceptional, a Cartier-Bresson, a Capa or a Brandt, would require toil, rejection & struggle

And Emma felt another small portion of her soul fall away