382 Quotes by David Nicholls

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? No, said Connie, exposure brought understanding. Only by confronting the worst traumas of life could you comprehend them and face them down, and off we’d trot to watch another play about man’s inhumanity to man.

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?

We can just hang out and walk and read and talk and stuff.

No matter how predictable, banal and listless the rest of my life might be, you can guarantee that there’ll always be something interesting going on with my skin.

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!

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.

Josh likes to say he put the funk in ‘functional’. Personally I think he just put the ass in ‘embarrassing’, but, hey, what do I know?

Whenever I hear Edith Piaf sing “Non, je ne regrette rien” – which is more often than I’d like, now that I’m at university – I can’t help thinking, What the hell is she talking about? I regret pretty much everything.

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.