You Are Here Quotes

“It’s true I do have time and freedom and I love it, sometimes. But the notion that I should be “making the most of it”, travelling the world or out every night, there’s a kind of tyranny in that too, that life has to be full, like your life’s a hole that you have to keep filling, a leaky bucket, and not just fulfilled but seen to be fulfilled. “You don’t have kids, why can’t you speak Portuguese?” Do I have to have hobbies and projects and lovers? Do I have to excel? Can’t I just be happy, or unhappy, just mess about and read and waste time and be unfulfilled by myself?”
― David Nicholls, You Are Here

“Private, intimate, a book was something she could pull around and over herself, like a quilt.”
― David Nicholls, You Are Here

“Time is a sensation that alters depending on where you are,”
― David Nicholls, You Are Here

“There is who we want to be, she thought, and there is who we are.”
― David Nicholls, You Are Here

“Sometimes, she thought, it’s easier to remain lonely than present the lonely person to the world, but she knew that this, too, was a trap, that unless she did something, the state might become permanent, like a stain soaking into wood.”
― David Nicholls, You Are Here

“There is who we want to be, she thought, and there is who we are. As we get older the former gives way to the latter, and maybe this is who I am now, someone better off by themselves. Not happier, but better off. Not an introvert, just an extrovert who had lost the knack.”
― David Nicholls, You Are Here

“The risks involved in romantic love, the potential for hurt and betrayal and indignity, far outweighed the consolations.”
― David Nicholls, You Are Here

“[A]nd, once again, she was confronted by the gulf between expectation and reality, no sun on her face, no union with nature, no laughter with friends, no sex. No matter how carefully you packed your bag, there was no protection against this furious disappointment.”
― David Nicholls, You Are Here

“Because I don't want to go home,' said Michael.
'We all have to go home sometime.”
― David Nicholls, You Are Here

“perhaps there had been something a little obsessive about it, the way she’d consumed the shelves of the local library, Blyton to Jansson, C. S. Lewis to P. G. Wodehouse, Christie then du Maurier then the Brontës, reading indiscriminately but always passionately, so that even her dislikes were passionate. Dickens, she thought, was preachy and silly, like a teacher putting on funny voices, but never mind, here were Jane Austen and Sue Townsend, Ursula K. Le Guin and Jean M. Auel, and each Saturday morning she’d return her stack of library books, the maximum permitted, placing them on the counter, like a gambler cashing in chips.”
― David Nicholls, You Are Here

“Three days of walking with strangers. It was the kind of potentially awful experience she needed”
― David Nicholls, You Are Here

“This year the photographs would be different. There’d be no more self-willed illness, no more cosiness, no candles sucking the oxygen from the room, no more relentless self-care. Instead she’d care for others, revive her friendships and make new ones, engage in the messy, confusing business of other people.”
― David Nicholls, You Are Here

“You know that thing when you're watching a film that you're not really enjoying and the other person doesn't like it either, but you've paid for the rental, you're halfway through, you sort of want to know what happens and, besides, there's nothing else on. But really you're just waiting for someone to say, "Can we stop this? I hate it." And neither of us did. Some people sit like that for their whole lives together. Waiting for it to pick up, waiting for a good bit. We were lucky in that respect. It could have gone on longer.”
― David Nicholls, You Are Here

“So you’re working on solo material now?’ ‘I’m back in the studio.’ ‘Forming Wings?’ ‘Oh, I’m not sure I’m Paul.’ ‘So which one are you? Of the four basic personality types.’ ‘I don’t know. You tell me.’ She looked at his face, as if this might help. ‘George, I think.’ ‘Really? Doesn’t everyone want to be John?’ ‘The Pauls all want to be Johns and the Johns are generally unbearable. The Ringos are nice enough and fun. But a George is the classiest option. Trust me,’ she said, ‘a George is the thing to be,’ and he felt satisfied with that. ‘Right. What’s next?”
― David Nicholls, You Are Here

“Less than twenty-four hours later she felt the pull of home, secure and dry, with her books and radio and blankets, sure of what the day would hold.”
― David Nicholls, You Are Here

“The bar was suddenly busy with what’s called ‘an older crowd’, hunched male backs in olive green, and she felt absurdly overdressed in her small black dress, Audrey Hepburn addressing the National Farmers Union.”
― David Nicholls, You Are Here

“It would be nice to use a familiar toilet but her most pressing commitment was to an open packet of feta that would need to be eaten by Thursday, and she couldn’t let her decisions be swayed by half a block of brined cheese.”
― David Nicholls, You Are Here

“Books saw her through the pupal stage of thirteen to sixteen, frowning at Kafka and Woolf, then tearing through John Irving and Maeve Binchy, widely read in the proper sense, making no distinction between Jilly Cooper and Edith Wharton. There were stories on film and TV and, a little later, in the rolling melodrama of the internet, but those were team activities, noisy and social. Private, intimate, a book was something she could pull around and over herself, like a quilt.”
― David Nicholls, You Are Here

“She was reaching for her phone and it occurred to her how intimate, how significant it was, to take someone’s photograph for the first time and add them to your library, like a book that you’ve read or at least started reading.”
― David Nicholls, You Are Here

“Apparently, there was meant to be beauty in cracks, cracks were how the light gets in but, more importantly, they were how the liquid gets out. No one really wants a leaky cup.”
― David Nicholls, You Are Here

“A common mistake in manuscripts was confusion over the words ‘envy’ and ‘jealousy’, the first meaning to want what someone else has, the second including the fear that someone might take what’s yours.”
― David Nicholls, You Are Here

“Also men fall into two classes – those who forget views and those who remember them, even in small rooms E. M. Forster, A Room with a View”
― David Nicholls, You Are Here

“she went on a solo trip to Italy, role-playing a character in a Forster novel. In Florence, she read performatively in cafés and sat in the cool of exquisite churches, straining for some kind of spiritual feeling. In Rome, she visited the Non-Catholic Cemetery and sought out the graves of Keats and Shelley and found herself moved and mortified by being moved.”
― David Nicholls, You Are Here

“But life seemed fuller, more populated than it had a year ago. She went to exhibitions and films, sometimes alone, sometimes with a friend, and when she’d saved enough of Neil’s money, which was her money, she went on a solo trip to Italy, role-playing a character in a Forster novel. In Florence, she read performatively in cafés and sat in the cool of exquisite churches, straining for some kind of spiritual feeling. In Rome, she visited the Non-Catholic Cemetery and sought out the graves of Keats and Shelley and found herself moved and mortified by being moved.”
― David Nicholls, You Are Here

“You were traumatised.’ ‘I wonder if people use that word too much.’ ‘It’s the right word for something traumatic.’ ‘But it wasn’t war. People get beaten up every Friday night.’ ‘And are traumatised by it.”
― David Nicholls, You Are Here

“The stories we tell about ourselves are never neutral: they’re shaped and structured to create an impression,”
― David Nicholls, You Are Here

“For the moment she felt content, not because she’d spoken but because she’d been listened to.”
― David Nicholls, You Are Here

“Not an introvert, just an extrovert who had lost the knack.”
― David Nicholls, You Are Here

“Sometimes, she thought, it’s easier to remain lonely than present the lonely person to the world, but she knew that this, too, was a trap, that unless she did something, the state might become permanent, like a stain soaking into wood. It was no good. She would have to go outside.”
― David Nicholls, You Are Here

“I will clamber through the Clouds and exist. I will get such an accumulation of stupendous recollections that as I walk through the suburbs of London, I may not see them. Keats, in a letter to Robert Haydon, April 1818”
― David Nicholls, You Are Here