Nicci French Quotes & Sayings

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

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

Better to start too slowly and build up," said a piece of text in italics, "than start too quickly and give up. — Nicci French

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

it was like glass sandpaper being rubbed on my skin. — Nicci French

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

You never step into the same river twice, — Nicci French

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

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

It's what the loss uncovers in you that brings on despair, not the loss itself. — Nicci French

She loathed Christmas, and she loathed the run-up to Christmas, the frenzied shoppers, the tat in the shops, the lights that were put up too early in the streets, the Christmas songs that belted out from overheated shops day after day, the catalogues that poured through her door and into her bin, and above all the insistence on the value of family. Frieda did not value her family and they did not value Frieda. A great gulf lay between them, impassable. The — 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

I don't want you to be interested in my life. I want you to be interested in me. — 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

If you call the day after, you're maybe a bit desperate because, since the first day is out of the question, the second day is really the first day, so you're calling on the first day. If they're going to call, people call on the third day. — Nicci French

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