Book: One Day... and its most delicious lines
I have been indulging in One Day by David Nicholls. It's one of those books you read slowly to savour all the good phrases. It's also a movie, as you can tell by the photo above. I'm not even going to tell you what it's about. I'm just sharing a few of the great lines. Don't worry. No spoilers. Just really lovely lines."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.""He wanted to live life in such a way that if a photograph were taken at random, it would be a cool photograph.""At this stage in his life, his main criterion for choosing a career was that it should sound good in a bar, shouted into a girl's ear...""Dexter had never consciously set out to be famous, though he had always wanted to be successful, and what was the point of being successful in private? People should know.""Dexter wrenches the wheel once more without even checking what is in the slow lane and he is suddenly sure that he is going to die, right here and now, in a ball of searing flame while listening to an extended Jamiroquai remix."About Dexter's girlfriends: "They're like funfair goldfish; no point in giving them names, they never last that long.""You're gorgeous, you old hag, and if I could give you just one gift ever for the rest of your life it would be this. Confidence. It would be the gift of Confidence. Either that or a scented candle.""The night before, get a train to Agra and stay in a cheap motel. Next morning, get up early and go to the Taj Mahal. Perhaps you've heard of it. Big white building named after that Indian restaurant on the Lothian Road.""He shook the cramp from his hand; eleven pages written at great speed, the most he had written since his finals. Stretching his arms above his head in satisfaction he thought: this isn't a letter, it's a gift.""Living in her University town felt like staying on at a party that everyone else had left.""She knew that there was no chance of a relationship between them. Too much had happened to him, too little had happened to her.""'She says I'm complicated.'"Complicated. You're like a two-piece jigsaw." She sat and brushed the grass from her shin. 'In thick ply.'""She drinks pints of coffee and writes little observations and ideas for stories with her best fountain pen on the linen-white pages of expensive notebooks. Sometimes, when it's going badly, she wonders if what she believes to be a love of the written word is really just a fetish for stationery. The true writer, the born writer, will scribble words on scraps of litter, the back of a bus ticket, on the wall of a cell. Emma is lost on anything less than 120gsm.""At the best of times she feels like a character in a Muriel Spark novel – independent, bookish, sharp-minded, secretly romantic.""She was discovering once again that reading and writing were not the same – you couldn't just soak it up then squeeze it out again.""I love him, she thought, I'm just not in love with him and also I don't love him. I've tried, I've strained to love him but I can't. I am building a life with a man I don't love, and I don't know what to do about it.""Friends were like clothes: fine while they lasted but eventually they wore thin or you grew out of them.""Their friendship was like a wilted bunch of flowers that she insisted on topping up with water.""She examined herself in the mirror. She had been hoping for understated sophistication, but she felt like a make-over, abandoned halfway through.""He wears unlaced trainers, tracksuit bottoms, an un-ironed shirt. It's an outfit that has been carefully put together to suggest maximum emotional disarray. He is dressed to upset.""The architects had labelled it not an office, but a 'dreamspace' in Helvetica, lower case."
