A Very Nice Girl Quotes

“I realized I'd always believed what other people said about me. What he'd said about me. We remember everything other people say about us, I think. Wear a skin made of all those words, so that when we look at ourselves in the mirror, that's what we see. I was starting to pick that skin away, and I was happy. I liked what I found underneath.”
― Imogen Crimp, A Very Nice Girl

“You know what your problem is? It’s that you’re too busy worrying about what other people think of you to work out what you think of them.”
― Imogen Crimp, A Very Nice Girl

“Why did I ever think I wanted something so spectacular—that I was deserving of something so special in my life—when what makes me happy is so ordinary, so entirely banal? This—this—that it is me he reaches for in the night, unconsciously. The feel of his arm, heavy, across my back in the dark.”
― Imogen Crimp, A Very Nice Girl

“I lay there, thinking, you build one person up to be the person who can give your life color and meaning, the person who can save you, but they can't do that, no one can do that.
Thinking, there must have been a moment when I could have walked away from this and it wouldn't have hurt, but I couldn't remember.”
― Imogen Crimp, A Very Nice Girl

“Not muting my color to match someone else's.”
― Imogen Crimp, A Very Nice Girl

“Thinking, this is useless, useless, this nostalgia which makes beautiful forever times you know were complicated, a mess, that made you unhappy—it serves no purpose, surely, you think, this longing always for the past.”
― Imogen Crimp, A Very Nice Girl

“I realized that this art I loved could say anything I wanted it to, not just the same things over and over again.”
― Imogen Crimp, A Very Nice Girl

“If you hold me up to different men, I take on their color. Become more like them, less like myself.”
― Imogen Crimp, A Very Nice Girl

“People are like that, aren't they, like optical illusions. Once you've got them in your head one way, it's hard to tip them over.”
― Imogen Crimp, A Very Nice Girl

“They stood on the platform, and I got on the train and found them again through the window. I felt guilty almost straightaway, looking at them from a distance, and thinking about the stocking Mum still put at the end of my bed, the dessert wine Dad got because I liked it, my new jumper that exactly matched my eyes, and wondering why, when it would cost me so little now, I found it so hard to be kind. They waved, and the train pulled away.”
― Imogen Crimp, A Very Nice Girl

“Knowing even as I formed the words that I wouldn’t. I was exhausted. It was exhausting, being around someone who watched your every movement but didn’t approve. A few times over the past week, she’s left the room for a minute, and I’d realized — a habit I hadn’t known I had, until I started to sing — that I’d been holding my breath.”
― Imogen Crimp, A Very Nice Girl

“I love you, and you've never lied to me. You like me. You think I'm pretty and funny and you like talking to me. You like sitting across from me at the restaurant tables, putting your hand on my leg in bars and laying next to me in bed. You like my body. You like wrapping your fingers round my hair and kissing my neck and running your tongue up the inside of my thighs. You like me and I love you and everything you've ever told me is true.”
― Imogen Crimp, A Very Nice Girl