Top 180 David Nicholls Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “This is where it all begins. Everything starts here, today.”

— David Nicholls

Featured in: New Beginnings Quotes

2. “Whatever happens tomorrow, we had today; and I’ll always remember it.”

— David Nicholls

Featured in: Romantic Quotes, Making Memories Quotes, Anniversary Quotes

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

— David Nicholls

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

— David Nicholls

5. “Welcome to the graveyard of ambition.”

— David Nicholls

Featured in: Ambition Quotes

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

— David Nicholls

7. “Who do you think you are, Jane Eyre? Grow up. Be sensible. Don’t get carried away.”

— David Nicholls

8. “Today. This bright new day that awaits us.”

— David Nicholls

9. “Envy was just the tax you paid on success.”

— David Nicholls

10. “Dexter, I love you so much. So, so much, and I probably always will. I just don’t like you anymore. I’m sorry.”

— David Nicholls

11. “If you have to keep a secret it’s because you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”

— David Nicholls

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

12. “You can’t throw away years of your life because it makes a funny anecdote.”

— David Nicholls

13. “And then some days you wake up and everything’s perfect.”

— David Nicholls

14. “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.”

— David Nicholls

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

— David Nicholls

16. “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.”

— David Nicholls

17. “If you’re my friend I should be able to talk to you but I can’t, and if I can’t talk to you, well, what is the point of you? Of us?”

— David Nicholls

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

— David Nicholls

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

— David Nicholls

20. “Screenwriting is always about what people say or do, whereas good writing is about a thought process or an abstract image or an internal monologue, none of which works on screen.”

— David Nicholls

21. “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?”

— David Nicholls

22. “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.”

— David Nicholls

23. “Be good. Do something good.”

— David Nicholls

24. “These days the nights and mornings have a tendency to bleed into one another.”

— David Nicholls

25. “You can live your whole life not realizing that what you’re looking for is right in front of you.”

— David Nicholls

26. “I’m not the consolation prize, Dex. I’m not something you resort to. I happen to think I’m worth more than that.”

— David Nicholls

27. “I am not up to this. I am not capable. I thought I would be, but I’m not. Some part of me is missing, and I cannot do this.”

— David Nicholls

28. “Call me sentimental, but there’s no-one in the world that I’d like to see get dysentery more than you.”

— David Nicholls

29. “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.”

— David Nicholls

30. “Better by far to be good and courageous and bold and to make difference. Not change the world exactly, but the bit around you.”

— David Nicholls

31. “Oh you know me. I have no emotions. I’m a robot. Or a nun. A robot nun.”

— David Nicholls

32. “And of course there is always joy in witnessing the joy of others.”

— David Nicholls

33. “He wanted to live life in such a way that if a photograph were taken at random, it would be a cool photograph.”

— David Nicholls

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

— David Nicholls

35. “But how can you not like music? That’s the same as not liking food! Or sex!”

— David Nicholls

36. “As new dawns go, this one is depressingly like the old dawn.”

— David Nicholls

37. “The true writer, the born writer, will scribble words on scraps of litter, the back of a bus tickets, on the wall of a cell.”

— David Nicholls

38. “She wondered if she was doomed to be one of those people who spend their lives trying things.”

— David Nicholls

39. “Then Emma Mayhew dies, and everything that she thought or felt vanishes and is gone forever.”

— David Nicholls

40. “I considered the concept of “oversharing”, and what undersharing might be, and whether it was ever possible to settle on something in between.”

— David Nicholls

41. “That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me. But, it is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it and think how different its course would have been. Pause, you who read this, and think for a long moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on that memorable day.’ Charles Dickens, Great Expectations.”

— David Nicholls

42. “I identified with Pip from ‘Great Expectations,’ especially when I was younger; I had the same kind of gaucheness and uncertainty.”

— David Nicholls

43. “People change, no use getting sentimental about it. Move on, find someone else.”

— David Nicholls

44. “I read a lot of F. Scott Fitzgerald. I love ‘Tender is the Night,’ and its atmosphere of doomed romance. He was one of the greatest prose stylists, with a wonderfully clear but lyrical quality.”

— David Nicholls

Featured in: Romance Quotes

45. “Their friendship was like a wilted bunch of flowers that she insisted on topping up with water. Why not let it die instead?”

— David Nicholls

46. “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.”

— David Nicholls

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

— David Nicholls

48. “The attraction of a life devoted to sensation, pleasure and self would probably wear thin one day, but there was still plenty of time for that yet.”

— David Nicholls

49. “We’re not ourselves, are we? I’m certainly not myself, not anymore. And you’re not either. You don’t seem yourself. Not as I remember you.”

— David Nicholls

50. “Fear and anxiety are great motivators for me.”

— David Nicholls