Nicci French > Quotes

“I don't want you to be interested in my life. I want you to be interested in me.”
― Nicci French, Killing Me Softly

“If I had to ask him to ask me, it wasn't going to work as an expression of concern. Like when you ask someone if they love you - if you have to ask them, they don't. Or not enough. Not the way you want them to.”
― Nicci French, Land of the Living

“Πάντοτε αγαπούσε την αίσθηση των θαμμένων μυστικών που υπήρχαν σε μια μεγαλούπολη και του μυστηριώδους τρόπου με τον οποίο τα μυστικά αυτά μπορούσαν να κάνουν την εμφάνισή τους, αναπάντεχα, αποσπασματικά, πάνω στα παλιά κτίρια”
― Nicci French

“I wake in the night. Or sometimes I don't wake in the night. It hardly seems to make a difference.”
― Nicci French, The Red Room

“Δεν ξέρω... περιμένω να αρχίσει η πραγματική μου ζωή, η ζωή που υποτίθεται ότι θα είχα. Η πραγματική ζωή, ο πραγματικός έρωτας, δεν ξέρω...”
― Nicci French

“And how do you undo damage that’s been built into the foundations? With houses, it’s easier to pull the whole thing down and start again. You can’t do that with people.”
― Nicci French, Secret Smile

“She never opened her mail in the middle of the day. Sometimes she forgot about it for a week or more until people rang to complain. Nor did she check her answering machine messages. In fact, it had only been in the last year that she had finally bought an answering machine, and she steadfastly refused to have a mobile, to the incredulity of all those around her, who didn’t believe that people could actually function without one. But Frieda wanted to be able to escape from incessant communications and demands. She didn’t want to be at anyone’s beck and call, and she liked cutting herself off from the urgent inanities of the world. When she was on her own, she liked to be truly alone. Out of contact and adrift.”
― Nicci French, Blue Monday

“If you behave as if you are all right, then one day you will be. You have to go through the motions of surviving in order to survive.”
― Nicci French, Killing Me Softly

“It made me realize how unimaginative I had always been about battered wives. Disaster creeps up, a tidal wave on the tourist beach. By the time you can see it, you are powerless or unable to resist it and it rolls you up and away.”
― Nicci French

“Thursday is perhaps the worst day of the week. It's nothing in itself; it just reminds you that the week has been going on too long.”
― Nicci French, Thursday's Child

“there’s a difference between doing something and being something, but they merge into each other. I mean, you play the piano a bit, and then more and more, and at some point you become a pianist. That’s who you are.”
― Nicci French, Tuesday's Gone

“Within families, you’re stuck with the character they think you are, whatever you do. You become a war hero and all that your parents ever talk about is something supposedly funny you used to do when you were in nursery school.”
― Nicci French, Secret Smile

“Maybe I don’t want it to pass because that would mean an acceptance that life is like this: just a gradual process of loss.”
― Nicci French, Dark Saturday

“Τελικά πώς μετράς την απουσία; Είχαν υπάρξει λεπτά που έγιναν ώρες, και ώρες που ενώθηκαν σε μια άχαρη έρημο χωρίς ορίζοντα. Είχαν υπάρξει μέρες μουντές και βαριές σαν μολύβι, και ολόκληρες εβδομάδες στη διάρκεια των οποίων πίεζε τον εαυτό της να προχωρήσει μπροστά, βήμα βήμα διασχίζοντας την έρημο του χρόνου.”
― Nicci French, Tuesday's Gone

“It's what the loss uncovers in you that brings on despair, not the loss itself.”
― Nicci French, Friday on My Mind

“She had Googled psychogeography, just to make sure she wasn’t getting it wrong. It was, she discovered, about playfulness, about drifting around urban environments, about getting away from your normal routes, about opening yourself up to randomness.”
― Nicci French, Day of the Dead

“Real life is an overrated idea.”
― Nicci French, Tuesday's Gone

“There was a pause. Frieda was about to stand up and fetch the nurse when David spoke again, in a quiet voice. “That—that thing you say happened to you . . .” “The rape,” said Frieda. “It has a name.” “Yes. Well. Are you—I mean, what’s going on with that?” Frieda looked at her mother, who had never believed her story and who now never would. “I don’t want to talk about it, David.” “That’s probably for the best.” He sounded relieved. “I mean, it’s all in the past and sometimes you just have to let sleeping dogs lie.” Wake up those dogs, thought Frieda. Set them loose on the world.”
― Nicci French, Thursday's Children

“[...] I hate Mondays, don't you?"
"Not really”
― Nicci French, Blue Monday

“You never step into the same river twice,”
― Nicci French, Thursday's Child

“Better to start too slowly and build up,” said a piece of text in italics, “than start too quickly and give up.”
― Nicci French, Secret Smile

“Perhaps because smoking can be a way of getting through the time, when you don’t know how to endure things,” said Frieda. “For a few minutes, that’s what you’re doing: you’re smoking a cigarette.”
― Nicci French, Day of the Dead

“No. This is stuff that is from the first half of the alphabet. But I’m not completely consistent. Sometimes I go by the first name and sometimes by the second, then forget which I’ve done.”
― Nicci French, Saturday Requiem

“Pauline had once said to me, after she was through the worst of her stunned unhappiness, that if you behave as if you are all right, then one day you will be.”
― Nicci French, Killing Me Softly

“George Eliot: “It is never too late to be what you might have been.”
― Nicci French, Day of the Dead

“Δεν στοιχηματίζω ποτέ. Ειδικά όταν έχω δίκιο.”
― Nicci French, Το ρέκβιεμ του Σαββάτου

“We’re always freer than we know.”
― Nicci French, Thursday's Children

“Ήταν άραγε κατάρα που η πόλη αυτή ήταν τόσο πολύ σημαδεμένη από το παρελθόν της ή μήπως αυτός είναι τελικά ο μοναδικός τρόπος μιας πόλης να υπάρχει;”
― Nicci French, Blue Monday

“Depression is a grim and blinding curse: you can’t see outside it. You can’t see hope, or love, or how spring will follow winter.”
― Nicci French, Tuesday's Gone

“It was the most silent, beautiful city I had ever been in, and I found myself wishing, once or twice, that I was here alone, not worrying about our relationship, not having to make an effort. I would have walked and walked along the deserted paths, not speaking, storing everything up. I wouldn't have minded the rain.”
― Nicci French, Secret Smile