Nick Alexander > Quotes

“I stand and grab a hefty bottle of perfume from the bathroom shelf and return to the bedroom door. It’s not much of a weapon, I know, but it’s heavy and square, and hitting someone over the head with a glass brick has got to be better than bitch-slapping them.”
― Nick Alexander, The Case Of The Missing Boyfriend

“You meet people and sometimes they’re more important to you than you are to them. Sometimes you just have to give thanks for all the ways knowing them has changed you, and watch them walk away to pastures new.”
― Nick Alexander, Things We Never Said

“Fridays! They are the worst. Days stuffed with itsy-bitsy multicoloured tasks that fill every second of the day, but like M&M´s fail to nourish in any way.”
― Nick Alexander, The Case Of The Missing Boyfriend

“Air travel is such a strange experience. It´s such an intimate thing, to travel alongside a stranger for so many hours, to eat together, take in a film, snooze side by side. In economy I think that it´s so intimate, that like neighbours on the same landing, most of us consider that it´s better not to take the risk of ever getting to know them. In business class, there´s just enough room - as elbows don´t actually touch - to take that chance.”
― Nick Alexander, The Case Of The Missing Boyfriend

“As the red leaf warns: winter will be with us soon enough. If only I could bottle a little of this sunshine up and open it in January, like jam”
― Nick Alexander, The Case Of The Missing Boyfriend

“all we ever see of each other is the representation we hold inside our own minds.”
― Nick Alexander, Things We Never Said

“There are moments in life- and I would have to admit that I don´t have them as often as I would like - when everything just comes together, and when, even being single, I feel happy, relaxed and confident. Some days, like today, I feel, as the French would say, so comfortable in my skin, that I could almost cry with the joy of being alive”
― Nick Alexander, The Case Of The Missing Boyfriend

“A reasonable looking guy with a sense of humour to go to parties with: surely that´s not too much to ask, is it?”
― Nick Alexander, The Case Of The Missing Boyfriend

“Break-ups are survivable. It´s the aftershocks that get you.”
― Nick Alexander, The Case Of The Missing Boyfriend

“mean, they’ve admitted that the money won’t go to the NHS. And they’ve admitted we aren’t getting some fabulous trade deal. And they’ve said that immigration won’t even go down now, too. It’s as if everyone agrees that it’s a stupid idea, but everyone accepts that we’re going through with it anyway. It’s like a horrible toddler who has made a stupid decision but is sticking to it rather than admitting the error. It all smacks of cutting off your nose to spite your face more than anything else. Cutting off your continent”
― Nick Alexander, Things We Never Said

“wierding me out”
― Nick Alexander, The Case Of The Missing Boyfriend

“No one really knows anyone. That’s amazing, isn’t it? We share everything, but we all have our secret gardens, too. We all have fantasies and fears and fetishes. We all have secrets about ourselves we don’t want to share.”
― Nick Alexander, Things We Never Said

“It’s madness really that society expects a newly bereaved person to jump through so many hoops.”
― Nick Alexander, Let the Light Shine

“Yep. It’s basically the same car as a VW Touareg,”
― Nick Alexander, The Other Son

“I’m overreacting, probably,” Sophie says. “I just get a little bored with the abused-women-equals-art thing. It just all seems a bit eighties to me. Do you know what I mean?”
― Nick Alexander, The Photographer's Wife

“Half of them have beards too, which I´m afraid is a no-go area for me. I don´t spend half my life waxing to end up kissing a bunch of pubes.”
― Nick Alexander, The Case Of The Missing Boyfriend

“Don’t think you know what battles I had to fight to get where I am today. Don’t think you can even imagine what suffering we had to go through, what secrets we had to hide. You think you know everything but you know nothing. You don’t know me – you don’t know anyone. Because that’s what life is. It’s thinking you know everything, and thinking you know everyone, and finding out, the older you get, that you didn’t – that you had it all wrong.” - B. Marsden.”
― Nick Alexander, The Photographer's Wife

“That even now, even after all the years of dreaming, of wanting, she is not Tristan, and she is not Jill, and she is not anyone who can recklessly seize unexpected opportunities.”
― Nick Alexander, The Half-life of Hannah

“To want your child to remain innocent whilst toughening up enough to survive This Life is entirely contradictory, but, as far as I can tell, an almost-universal parental desire. It”
― Nick Alexander, The Half-life of Hannah

“[D]on't be so open minded that your brain falls out.”
― Nick Alexander

“TO LOSE SOMEONE YOU REALLY LOVE / IS HARD BEYOND BELIEF / YOUR HEART COMES CLOSE TO BREAKING POINT / AND NO ONE KNOWS THE GRIEF / MANY TIMES I’VE THOUGHT OF YOU / AND MANY TIMES I’VE CRIED / IF MY LOVE COULD HAVE SAVED YOU / YOU NEVER WOULD HAVE DIED.”
― Nick Alexander, Things We Never Said

“Mona´s Law apparently states that everyone wants three things - that happiness is made up on three - piece jigsaw: a good relationship, a nice place to live, and a good job. And Mona´s law states that it is mathematically impossible to maintain more than two out of the three. Thus, if you have a good job and a nice flat and you meet a lovely guy, bam-you lose your job. So you change jobs and find the perfect undreamt-of work opportunity, and wham, your landlord kicks you out on the street.”
― Nick Alexander, The Case Of The Missing Boyfriend

“And all of this leaves me wondering if this dream of mine-that out there, somewhere, hiding, there exists a guy who is cultured and calm, and smiley and faithful, who want´s to escape the rat-race with me and, apparently like the French, wear wellies and make cheese...Well, I wonder if it can possibly exist. I don´t want much...just someone who would flat on his stomach next to me in the garden watching ants carrying crumbs through the jungle of blades of grass. I wonder if that can ever exist, anywhere, for anyone.”
― Nick Alexander, The Case Of The Missing Boyfriend

“that those who are no longer with us remain with us specifically through our memories of them. That memories are perhaps more than just recordings, that they are the actual essence of the people we have known, the places we have been, lingering on long after the event, like time travellers, like ghosts.”
― Nick Alexander, The Photographer's Wife

“La peur est tellement envahissante, tellement omniprésente, qu'elle en devient presque normale. Il n'en demeure pas moins que vivre sous l'emprise de la peur, même quand elle ne vous quitte jamais, est une expérience éprouvante [...].”
― Nick Alexander, The Photographer's Wife

“Happiness is a relative concept.”
― Nick Alexander, The Photographer's Wife

“seat”
― Nick Alexander, Things We Never Said

“I understood that I was a fairly highly strung person, that my default state was one of readiness. I had rarely felt completely comfortable in my skin or at ease with my surroundings. I was always in a state of alert, on the lookout for any kind of menace or danger, and events and people had often proved me right because, I suppose, my judgement simply wasn’t that good. I suspect much of this came from my upbringing, which had rarely felt relaxed, or even happy.”
― Nick Alexander, You Then, Me Now

“But I never did manage to tell you because I could never quite put the words together to express something so complex and sordid and exciting and stupid,. I still wonder how that conversation might have gone.”
― Nick Alexander, Things We Never Said

“my pink”
― Nick Alexander, You Then, Me Now