Quotes from David Nicholls

Cherish your friends, stay true to your principles, live passionately and fully and well. Experience new things. Love and be loved, if you ever get the chance. That

But perhaps it's a delusion for each generation to think that they know better than their parents. If this were true, than parental wisdom would increase with time like the processing power of computer chips, refining over generations, and we'd how be living in some utopia of openness and understanding. (pag.288)

But saying yes would feel like caving in, and Emma knew from novels that you should never cave in to marriage.

Well I can tell you now that married life is not a plateau, not at all. There are ravines and great jagged peaks and hidden crevasses that send the both of you scrabbling into darkness. Then there are dull, parched stretches that you feel will never end, and much of the journey is in fraught silence, and sometimes you can't see the other person at all, sometimes they drift off very far away from you, quite out of sight, and the journey is hard. It is just very, very, very hard.

I had an infinite number of questions and would have been happy for her to recount her life in real time, would have been happy to walk on past Whitechapel and Limehouse into Essex and the estuary and on into the sea if she'd wanted to.

Why can't you just love me? Why can't you just be in love with me? You were once, weren't you? In the beginning.' 'Course I was.' 'Well why can't you be in love with me again?

Can I say something? Before we go back to the party?' 'Go on.' 'I'm a little drunk.' 'Me too. That's okay.' 'Just … I missed you, you know.' 'I missed you too.' 'But so, so much, Dexter. There were so many things I wanted to talk to you about, and you weren't there—' 'Same here.' 'And I feel a little guilty, sort of running away like that.

A veces uno es consciente de cuándo están produciéndose los grandes momentos de su vida y a veces los descubre al mirar el pasado. Tal vez suceda lo mismo con las personas." James Salter, Quemar los días

Emma está cansada de gritar de entusiasmo al ver gatear a un bebé, como si lo de gatear fuese una novedad completamente inesperada. ¿Qué esperaban, que volase?

The beauty of the ultrasound scan is something that only parents can appreciate

Like some overcrowded party, no-one had noticed her arrival, and no-one would notice if she left.

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...So why don't you believe it?

before two a.m.

and most importantly of all, don't let the audience intimidate or goad you in any way. Interaction is great. Retaliation is not. Don't let them rile you. Don't give them that satisfaction.

She didn't feel like an adult. She was in no way prepared. It was as if a fire alarm had gone off in the middle of the night and she was standing on the street with her clothes bundled up in her arms.

She could be breathing fire and I wouldn't mind. 'You could be breathing fire and I wouldn't mind,' I say.

you know, if I ruled the world, which I fully intend to do one day by the way, first thing I'd do...

the lagers are warm and the takeaway's cold

grief is as much regret for what we have never had as sorrow for what we have lost. As

my digs look as if they've been dug

He had always imagined that some sort of emotional mental equipment was meant to arrive, when he was forty-five, say, or fifty, a kind of kit that would enable him to deal with the impending loss of a parent. If he were only in possession of this equipment, he would be just fine. He would be noble and selfless, wise and philosophical. Perhaps he would even have kids of his own, and would presumably possess the kind of maturity that comes with fatherhood, the understanding of life as a process.

I'm inclined to think that, after a certain age, our tastes, instincts and inclinations harden like concrete.

Our biographies involve each other so intrinsically now that we're both on nearly every page.

Well I've fucked the olives. Not literally I might hasten to add!