DNDavid Nicholls

88 collected words

David Nicholls

Dates not recorded

Name supplied in the contributor-provided quotation collection. Basic attribution label; identity, lifetime and quotation authenticity have not been independently verified.

▷ Play this voice Search these words ↗Place in time ↗life justice knowledge friendship mind happiness love truth

Quotations and sayings

01Undated

And there it is again, the look. There's no doubt about it, if Sylvie had a receipt, she would have taken him back by now; this one's gone wrong. It's not what I wanted.

David Nicholls / quote

02Undated

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.

David Nicholls / quote

03Undated

He swatted at her with his book. "Shut up and read, will you?"He lay back down and closed his eyes. Emma glanced over to check that he was smiling, and smiled too.

David Nicholls / quote

04Undated

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 / quote

05Undated

You should visit the Palatine. It's at the top of that hill . . .""I know where the Palatine is, Dexter, I was visiting Rome before you were born.""Yes, who was emperor back then?

David Nicholls / quote

06Undated

...grief is as much about regret for what you've never had as sadness for what you've lost.

David Nicholls / quote

07Undated

These days grief seems like walking on a frozen river; most of the time he feels safe enough, but there is always that danger that he will plunge through. Now he hears the ice creak beneath him, and so intense and panicking is the sensation that he has to stand for a moment, press his hands to his face and catch his breath.

David Nicholls / quote

08Undated

There is a point in the future where even the worst disaster starts to settle into an anecdote.

David Nicholls / quote

09Undated

Paris was all so... Parisian. I was captivated by the wonderful wrongness of it all - the unfamiliar fonts, the brand names in the supermarket, the dimensions of the bricks and paving stones. Children, really quite small children, speaking fluent French!

David Nicholls / quote

10Undated

Familiarity, globalisation, cheap travel, mere weariness had diluted our sense of foreign-ness.

David Nicholls / quote

11Undated

It's scented! Your wedding invitations are scented?""It's meant to be lavender.""No, Dex - it's money. It smells of money.

David Nicholls / quote

12Undated

Occasionally, very occasionally, say at four o’clock in the afternoon on a wet Sunday, she feels panic-stricken and almost breathless with loneliness. Once or twice she has been known to pick up the phone to check that it isn’t broken. Sometimes she thinks how nice it would be to be woken by a call in the night: ‘get in a taxi now’ or ‘I need to see you, we need to talk’. But at the best of times she feels like a character in a Muriel Spark novel – independent, bookish, sharp-minded, secretly romantic.

David Nicholls / quote

13Undated

Lonely' is a troubling word and not one to be tossed around lightly. It makes people uncomfortable, summoning up as it does all kinds of harsher adjectives, like 'sad' or 'strange'. 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 / quote

14Undated

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 / quote

15Undated

He wanted to live life to the extreme, but without any mess or complications. He wanted to live life in such a way that if a photograph were taken at random, it would be a cool photograph. Things should look right. Fun; there should be a lot of fun and no more sadness than absolutely necessary.

David Nicholls / quote

16Undated

The beauty of the ultrasound scan is something that only parents can appreciate, but Emma had seen these things before and knew what was required of her. ‘Beautiful,’ she sighed, though in truth it could have been a Polaroid of the inside of his pocket.

David Nicholls / quote

17Undated

Every week seems to bring another luxuriantly creamy envelope, the thickness of a letter-bomb, containing a complex invitation – a triumph of paper engineering – and a comprehensive dossier of phone numbers, email addresses, websites, how to get there, what to wear, where to buy the gifts. Country house hotels are being block-booked, great schools of salmon are being poached, vast marquees are appearing overnight like Bedouin tent cities. Silky grey morning suits and top hats are being hired and worn with an absolutely straight face, and the times are heady and golden for florists and caterers, string quartets and Ceilidh callers, ice sculptors and the makers of disposable cameras. Decent Motown cover-bands are limp with exhaustion. Churches are back in fashion, and these days the happy couple are travelling the short distance from the place of worship to the reception on open-topped London buses, in hot-air balloons, on the backs of matching white stallions, in micro-lite planes. A wedding requires immense reserves of love and commitment and time off work, not least from the guests. Confetti costs eight pounds a box. A bag of rice from the corner shop just won’t cut it anymore.

David Nicholls / quote

18Undated

From an evolutionary point of view, most emotions - fear, desire, anger - serve some practical purpose, but nostalgia is a useless, futile thing because it is a longing for something that is permanently lost . . . .

David Nicholls / quote

19Undated

I was wary of my sister's cooking, which invariably consisted of a tubular pasta and economy cheese, charred black on the surface, with either tinned tuna or lardy mince lurking beneath the molten crust ... So that evening, in a tiny flat in Tooting, I was pushed into the tiny kitchen where sixteen people sat crammed around a tiny trestle table designed for pasting wallpaper, one of my sister's notorious pasta bakes smouldering in its centre like a meteorite, smelling of toasted cat food.

David Nicholls / quote

20Undated

Their lips touched now, mouths pursed tight, their eyes open, both of them stock still. The moment held, a kind of such glorious confusion.

David Nicholls / quote

21Undated

Letters, like compilation tapes, were really vehicles for unexpressed emotions and she was clearly putting far too much time and energy into them.

David Nicholls / quote

22Undated

Was it the happiest day of our lives? Probably not, if only because the truly happy days tend not to involve so much organisation, are rarely so public or so expensive. The happy ones sneak up, unexpected.

David Nicholls / quote

23Undated

But now the train had finally begun to move, and Albie had switched the fearless truth-telling eye of his camera lens from his untied laces to the walls of the tunnels under east London, because you can never have enough pictures of dirty concrete.

David Nicholls / quote

24Undated

Generally speaking, I resolve to change my life on average maybe thirty to forty times a week, usually at about two a.m, drunk, ore early the next morning, hungover.

David Nicholls / quote