One Day Quotes
"I suppose the important thing is to make some sort of difference. You know, actually change something."
"The trick of it is to be courageous and bold and make a difference."
"Change lives through art maybe. Write beautifully."
"Experience new things. Love and be loved if at all possible."
"Live life in such a way that if a photograph were taken at random, it would be a cool photograph."
"You can't throw years of your life away because it makes a funny anecdote."
"I'm paying. Yes, I'm paying. For three hundred pounds of someone else's money, you could change your life."
"We're all meant to be like that at twenty-four."
"Failure and unhappiness is easier because you can make a joke out of it."
"You need to dangle something shiny in front of him."
"As soon as she’d met him at the arrivals gate on his return from Thailand, lithe and brown and shaven-headed, she knew that there was no chance of a relationship between them."
"Emma could say what she liked about the Tories (Dexter was no fan either, though more for reasons of style than principle) but they had certainly shaken up the media."
"She had never felt so far away from the launderette, the top deck of the night bus home, Tilly’s box room."
"A sturdy, honest, utilitarian pair of National Health spectacles showed that you didn’t care about silly trivia like looking nice."
"I think we’d want different things. From a relationship."
"In the years since leaving college this line of argument had come to seem so abstract and specious that she had finally succumbed to Dexter’s nagging and got the damn things."
"She owns a cafetiere and for the first time in her life she is considering investing in some pot-pourri."
"Someone wants to climb aboard the Tahiti, and tonight she will decide if she is going to let him."
"He reassures himself with the thought that, as he hasn’t been to sleep yet, this is not the first drink of the day, but the last drink of last night."
"Sometimes I worry that you’re not very nice."
"Your mother loves you very, very much. And I do too."
"I don’t want to talk about it, I just want to go home."
"I’ve got to go now! Why bring this up just as I’ve got to go?"
"It’s just a long way on public transport, and the party won’t get going ’til midnight."
"I want my best friend back, she thinks, because without him nothing is good and nothing is right."
"At that precise same moment, barely two miles away across the Thames, Emma Morley stands in an ascending lift with her old friend Stephanie Shaw."
"If it wasn’t I wouldn’t have given it to her. It’s not in my interest to give her rubbish to read."
"That’s TV, Dex, it’s faddy. He’s just a fad. You were the fad, now he’s the fad."
"You’re meant to stick by your friends aren’t you? Take the blow."
"I tell you what it is. It’s… when I didn’t see you, I thought about you every day, I mean every day in some way or another."
"You have a family, your responsibilities change, you lose touch with people."
"That night, sitting in the low-slung vinyl hospital chair, clutching the tiny, crimson-faced bundle, Dexter Mayhew made a solemn resolution."
"Life would be lived as if under Jasmine’s constant scrutiny."
"I have smoked cigarettes, got drunk, doped our baby, phoned old girlfriends, trashed the house, danced around mumbling to myself."
"I think it’s crazy, you having your own flat."
"I keep expecting to open a cupboard and be buried under, I don’t know… a cascade of panties or something."
"Work. He is working again in his own business, though ‘business’ feels a little too high-powered a word at present for this little delicatessen-café on a residential street."
"But all the time Emma was there, pushing him on, keeping him convinced that he was doing the right thing."
"He unlocks the heavy padlock that holds down the metal shutters, already hot to the touch on this radiant summer’s morning."
"For the first time in many years he is more or less where he wants to be."
"Everything will be fine, just as long as nothing ever changes."
"He has a partner whom he loves and desires and who is also his best friend."
"He felt like he had been taken hostage by a rogue fringe theatre company."
"But to just look at someone, to just sit and look and talk and then realise that it’s morning? Who had the time or inclination or energy these days to stay up talking all night?"
"If someone asked Emma, as they sometimes did at parties, how she and her husband had met, she told them: ‘We grew up together.’"
"I love you and we’ll sort this out, alright?"
"I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!"
"It’s bad enough that we’re rambling. It’ll be classical music next."
"What do you think I’ve been doing for the last ten years?"
"Loss has not endowed him with any kind of tragic grandeur, it has just made him stupid and banal."
"He wants to let his hair down, he deserves it after the year he has just had."
"‘No reason why you should,’ he mumbles, embarrassed."
"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."
"The process takes some time, but is carried out in an entirely dry-eyed, pragmatic way."
"The way the material has been packed means that he works through it in reverse chronological order."
"I think you’re nice, Dex, when you want to be."
"‘Live each day as if it’s your last’, that was the conventional advice, but really, who had the energy for that?"
"Cherish your friends, stay true to your principles, live passionately and fully and well."
"He can smell the hotel shampoo on Jasmine’s hair, feel her breath on his neck, salt and vinegar, slow and regular, as he drifts off into slumber."
"This is where it all begins. Everything starts here, today."
"It was the sweetest kiss that either of them would ever know."