David Nicholls

“Vivi ogni giorno come se fosse l’ultimo”, di solito il consiglio era questo, ma chi aveva l’energia sufficiente per farlo? E se pioveva o eri di cattivo umore? Era poco pratico. Molto meglio cercare di essere coraggiosi e audaci e cambiare le cose in meglio. Non proprio il mondo, ma il pezzettino intorno a te. Coltiva le amicizia, non tradire i tuoi principi, vivi intensamente, appassionatamente. Un giorno”

“When will you stop trying to educate me, I wonder? Never I hope.”

“They regarded each other for a moment. He lay down once more, and after a moment she followed and jumped a little when she found out that he had slid his arm beneath her shoulders. There was a self-conscious moment of mutual discomfort before she turned onto her side abs curled towards him. Tightening his arm around her, he spoke into the top of her head.‘You know what I can’t understand? You have all these people telling you all the time how great you are, smart, funny and talented and all that, I mean endlessly, I’ve been telling you for years. So why don’t you believe it? Why do you think people say that stuff, Em? Do you think it’s a conspiracy, people secretly ganging up to be nice to you?”

“Last night they had said and done all those things, and now they were like strangers in a bus queue. The mistake she had made was to fall asleep and break the spell.”

“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.”

“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.”

“She used to pride herself on her refusal to see two sides of an argument, but increasingly she accepts that issues are more ambiguous and complicated than she once thought.”

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

“No more sleepovers, no more writing poetry, no more wasting time. Time to tidy up your life. Time to start again.”

“Él puso suavemente una mano en la nuca, a la vez que ella le ponía suavemente la suya en la cadera, y se dieron un beso en la calle, rodeados de gente con prisa por volver a casa, en la luz de verano; y sería, para ambos, el beso más dulce de su vida.Aquí empieza todo. Empieza todo aquí, hoy.”

“Úgy éld minden napodat, mintha az volna az utolsó"- ezt szokták tanácsolni, de őszintén, kinek van erre energiája? Mi van, ha esik az eső, vagy ha az embernek kicsit nyomott a hangulata? Az egész valójában teljesen kivitelezhetetlen. Sokkal jobb, gondolta Emma, ha egyszerűen csak megpróbálsz jó, bátor és vakmerő lenni, és nyomot hagyni magad után a világban. Nem kell teljesen megváltoztatni a világot, csak azt a kicsit, ami körülötted van. Lépj ki a világba a szenvedélyeddel meg az elektromos írógépeddel és dolgozz nagy odaadással... valamin. Mondjuk változtasd meg az emberek életét a művészettel. Becsüld meg a barátaidat, maradj hű az elveidhez, élj szenvedélyesen, élj teljes és jó életet. Tapasztalj új dolgokat. Szeress és szeressenek viszont, ha lehetőséged van rá.”

“I applied for the University of Life. Didn't get the grades.”

“And by the time the train pulls into the station, I find myself actually relieved that Emily's only a figment of my imagination.”

“Welcome to the graveyard of ambition”

“Find the thing you love, and do it with all your heart, to the absolute best of your ability, no matter what people say.”

“In the future, I'll be braver, she told herself. In the future, I will always speak my mind, eloquently, passionately.”

“Falling in love like that? Writing poetry, crying at pop songs? Dragging people into photo-booths, taking a while day to make a compilation tape, asking people if they wanted to share your bed, just for company? If you quoted Bob Dylan or T.S. Eliot or, God forbid, Brecht at someone these days they would smile politely and step quietly backwards, and who would blame them?”

“But you're happy?''Yeah? I think I am. Are you?''Happier. Happyish.''Happyish. Well, happyish isn't so bad.''It's the most we can hope for.”

“Failure and unhappiness is easier because you can make a joke out of it.”

“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.”

“Imagine staying awake all night not because you're worried about the future but because it's FUN”

“Brian: I love booksProf. Morrison: The contents of books, or just owning a whole load of books?”

“She made you decent, and in return, you made her so happy.”

“He hoped to be successful, to make his parents proud and to sleep with more than one woman at the same time, but how to make these all compatible? He wanted to feature in magazine articles, and hoped one day for a retrospective of his work, without having any clear notion of what that work might be. 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.”

“Call me or I’ll call you, but one of us will call, yes? What I mean is it’s not a competition. You don’t lose I you phone first.”

“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.”

“She could see the words Calvin Klein against the brown hair on the small of his back and it occurred to her that this was probably not at all what Calvin Klein had in mind.”

“Suki is the nation’s ideal girlfriend, a woman for whom bubbliness is a way of life, verging on a disorder.”

“He's laughing me into a stupor, she thought. I could heckle, I suppose, I could throw a bread roll at him, but he's eaten them all. She glanced at the other diners, all of them going into their act, and thought is this what it all boils down to? Romantic love, is this all it is, a talent show? Eat a meal, go to bed, fall in love with me and I promise you years and years of top notch material like this?”

“In rare moments of self-doubt, Dexter had once worried that a lack of intellect might hold him back in life, but here was a job where confidence, energy, perhaps even a certain arrogance were all that mattered, all qualities that lay within his grasp.”

“The city had defeated her, just like they said it would. Like some overcrowded party, no one had noticed her arrival, and would notice if she left.”

“I want my best friend back, she thinks, because without him nothing is good and nothing is right.”

“Why can’t you just love me? Why can’t you just be in love with me?”

“I don’t think there’s anything we can do, is there? We either stop or we carry on.”

“Don’t keep fighting battles that are already lost.”

“Friends were like clothes: fine while they lasted but eventually they wore thin or you grew out of them.”

“Be good. Do something good.”

“He has found himself more and more reliant on her at exactly the point that she has become less available to him.”

“You must do what you enjoy.”

“I think you’re amazing,’ someone says to someone else, but it doesn’t matter who, because they’re all amazing really. People are amazing.”

“And you stupid, stupid woman, stupid for caring, stupid for thinking that he cared.”

“Everything was fine, and she had the rare, new sensation of being exactly where she wanted to be.”

“Time to tidy up your life. Time to start again.”

“At some point you’ll have to get serious about life.”

“Work hard at . . . something.”

“All his words and actions would now be fit for his daughter’s ears and eyes. Life would be lived as if under [her] constant scrutiny. He would never do anything that might cause her pain or anxiety or embarrassment and there would be nothing, absolutely nothing in his life to be ashamed of anymore.”

“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.”

“[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.”

“No Scrabble. More and more of his friends were playing it now, in a knowing ironic way, triple-word-score-craving freaks, but it seemed to him like a game designed expressly to make him feel stupid and bored.”

“Do you think it's a conspiracy, people secretly ganging up to be nice to you?”