Nick Hornby

“Will restrained a desire to leap in at this point and tell her that an inability to hold down a relationship was indicative of an undervalued kind of moral courage, that only cool people screwed up.”

“he was home on his own and listening to the sort of music he needed to listen to when he felt like this, music that seemed to find the sore spot in him and press up hard against it...”

“Reciprocation was a pretty powerful stimulant to the imagination.”

“He wanted Rachel to be his wife, his lover, the centre of his whole world; a girlfriend implied that he would see her from time to time, that she would have some kind of independent existence away from him, and he didn't want that at all.”

“Will had never wanted to fall in love. When it had happened to friends, it had always struck him as a peculiarly unpleasant-seeming experience, what with all the loss of sleep and weight, and the unhappiness when it was reciprocated, and the suspect, dippy happiness when it was working out.”

“He had to say that the thing he found most attractive about her was that she had tried to kill herself. Now that was interesting-- sexy, almost, in a morbid kind of way.”

“What was happening here? He decided that children were what was happening here; that children served as a symbolic blemish, like a birthmark or obesity, which gave him a chance where previously there would have been none. Maybe children democratized beautiful single women.”

“You run the risk of losing anyone who is worth spending timewith, unless you are so paranoid about loss that you choose someone unlosable, somebody who couldnot possibly appeal to anybody else at all.”

“Nobody worries about kids listeningto thousands, literally thousands, of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery andloss. The unhappiest people I know, romantically speaking, are the ones who like pop music the most;and I don’t know whether pop music has caused this unhappiness, but I do know that they’ve beenlistening to the sad songs longer than they’ve been living the unhappy lives.”

“How can that not leave you bruised somewhere? How can thatnot turn you into the sort of person liable to break into little bits when your first love goes all wrong?What came first, the music or the misery? Did I listen to music because I was miserable? Or was Imiserable because I listened to music? Do all those records turn you into a melancholy person?”

“And that's the last time we will ever speak, probably. 'No problem': the last words I will ever say to somebody I have been reasonably close to before our lives take different directions. Weird, eh? You spend Christmas at somebody's house, you worry about their operations, you give them hugs and kisses and flowers, you see them in their dressing gown...and then, bang, that's it. Gone forever. And sooner or later there will be another mum, another Christmas, more varicose veins.”

“We laughed. Ha, ha, we went. Ha, ha, ha. I’m not laughing now. Never has a joke filled me with such nausea and paranoia and insecurity and self-pity and dread and doubt.”

“I couldn’t bear to think about the proper future, so I just tried to make things better for the next twenty minutes or so, over and over again.”

“Seeing as he wasn’t very bright, I was pretty sure that he was going to be good at fighting.”

“Annyira szeretnék bocsánatot kérni attól a kiskölyöktől: „Sajnálom, cserbenhagytalak. Én vagyok az az ember, akinek igazából gondoskodnia kellett volna rólad, de én elrontottam: rossz döntéseket hoztam a legrosszabb pillanatokban, és elintéztem, hogy az legyen belőled, aki vagyok.”

“Talán mi túl magas lángon éljük az életünket, mi, akik egész nap érzelmes dolgokat szívunk magunkba, és emiatt aztán soha nem tudjuk egyszerűen csak elégedettnek érezni magunkat: az kell, hogy vagy boldogtalanok legyünk, vagy eksztatikusan, észveszejtően boldogok, márpedig ezeket az érzelmi állapotokat nehéz elérni egy stabil, nyugodt kapcsolaton belül.”

“A la mayoría de la gente le cabe en la cabeza el suicidio, supongo; la mayoría de la gente, aunque lo tenga muy oculto en lo más profundo de sí misma, puede recordar alguna vez en la vida en la que pensó si realmente quería despertar a la mañana siguiente. Querer morir parece una parte de estar vivo.”

“Will hated Christmas, for the obvious reason: people knocked on his door, singing the song he hated more than any song in the world and expected him to give them money.”

“His father fell off a window-ledge. No wonder his mum had cheered up.”

“But sometimes, very occasionally, songs and books and films and pictures express who you are perfectly. And they don’t do this in words or images, necessarily; the connection is a lot less direct and more complicated than that. When I was first beginning to write seriously, I read Anne Tyler’s Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, and suddenly knew what I was, and what I wanted to be, for better or worse. It’s a process something like falling in love. You don’t necessarily choose the best person, or the wisest, or the most beautiful; there’s something else going on. There was a part of me that would rather have fallen for Updike or Kerouac, or DeLillo – for someone masculine, or at least, maybe somebody a little more opaque, and certainly someone who uses more swearwords- and, though I have admired those writers, at various stages in my life, admiration is a very different thing from the kind of transference I’m talking about. I’m talking about understanding – or at least feeling like I understand- every artistic decision, every impulse, the soul of both the work and its creator. “This is me,” I wanted to say when I read Tyler’s rich, sad, lovely novel. “I’m not a character, I’m nothing like the author, I haven’t had the experiences she writes about. But even so, this is what I feel like, inside. This is what I would sound like, if I ever I were to find a voice.” And I did find a voice, eventually, and it was mine, not hers; but nevertheless, so powerful was the process of identification that I still don’t feel as though I’ve expressed myself as well, as completely, as Tyler did on my behalf.”

“You can see this everywhere you go: young middle-class people whose lives are beginning to disappoint them making to much noise in restaurants and clubs and winebars. 'Look at me! I'm not as boring as you think I am! I know how to have fun!' Tragic. I'm glad I learned to stay home and sulk.”

“I personally find that for domestic purposes, the Trivial Pursuit system works better than Dewey.”

“The point is not that my life is one long golden summer which I am simply too self-absorbed to appreciate (although it might be, of course, and I am simply too self-absorbed to appreciate it), but that happy moments are possible, and while happy moments are possible I have no right to demand anything more for myself, given the havoc that would be wrought.”

“I've had countless conversations with or about people who are "sleeping in separate bedrooms", as if sleeping in the same bed is all there is to staying married, but however bad things get, sharing a bed has never been problematic; it's the rest of life that horrifies.”

“I recently discovered that a friend who was re-reading Bleak House had done no other Dickens apart from Barnaby Ridge. That's just weird. I shamed and nagged him into picking up Great Expectations instead. But when I tried to recall anything about it other than its excellence, I failed. Maybe there was something about a peculiar stepfather? Or was that This Boy's Life? And I realized that, as this is true of just about every book I consumed between the ages of, say fifteen to forty, I havent even read the books I think I've read. I can't tell you how depressing this is. What's the fucking point?”

“It's like everyone's a supporting actor in the film of your life story.”

“Like most depressions that plague people who have been more fortunate than most, I was ashamed of mine because there appeared to me no convincing cause for it; I just felt as though I had come off the rails somewhere.”

“Life isn't, and has never been, a 2-0 home victory after a fish and chip lunch.”

“For the first time, but certainly not the last, I began to believe that Arsenal's moods and fortunes somehow reflected my own”

“I loved them, and would always love them. But there was no place where they could fit anymore, so I had nowhere to put all the things I felt. I didn't know what to do with them, and they didn't know what to do with me, and isn't that just like life?”

“They're not me, but I wish I was them. Maybe not them, exactly, because they're not so happy either. But I wish I was one of those people, the people who know what to say, the people who can't see the difference. Because it seems to me that you have more chance of being able to live a life you can stand if you're like that.”

“Una vez más, el fútbol como metáfora.”

“La música sentimental tiene la especial cualidad de llevarte hacia atrás en el tiempo a la vez que te lleva hacia delante, y por eso te sientes nostálgico y esperanzado a la vez.”

“It's not a case of the glass being half full or half empty; more that we tipped a whole half-pint into an empty pint pot. I had to see how much was there, though, and now I know.”

“It is a strange paradox that while the grief of football fans(and it is real grief) is private - we each have an individual relationship with our clubs, and I think that we are secretly convinced that none of the other fans understands quite why we have been harder hit than anyone else - we are forced to mourn in public, surrounded by people whose hurt is expressed in forms different from our own.”

“Several months later, and I have finally read one of the three (books), even though I wanted to read all three of them immediately. What happened in between? Other books, is what happened. Other books, other moods, other obligations, other appetites, other reading journeys.”

“The annoying thing about reading is that you can never get the job done. The other day I was in a bookstore flicking through a book called something like 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (and, without naming names, you should be aware that the task set by the title is by definition impossible, because at least four hundred of the books suggested would kill you anyway), but reading begets reading--that's sort of the point of it, surely?--and anybody who never deviates from a set list of books is intellectually dead anyway.”

“So this is supposed to be the how, and when, and why, and what or reading - about the way that, when reading is going well, one book leads to another and to another, a paper trail of theme and meaning; and how, when it's going badly, when books don't stick or take, when your mood and the mood of the book are fighting like cats, you'd rather do anything but attempt the next paragraph, or reread the last one for the tenth time. "We talked about books," says a character in Charles Baxter's wonderful Feast of Love, "how boring they were to read, but how you loved them anyway. Anyone who hasn't felt like that isn't owning up.”

“I can't tell you how good and bad I felt. Yes I can: I felt like a baked Alaska.”

“You see, what I really want, and what I'm getting with Stephen, is the opportunity to rebuild myself from scratch. David's picture of me is complete now, and I'm pretty sure neither of us likes it much; I want to rip the page out and start again on a fresh sheet, just like I used to do when I was a kid and had messed a drawing up. It doesn't even matter who the fresh sheet is, really, so its beside the point whether I like Stephen, or whether he knows what to do with me in bed, or anything like that. I just want his rapt attention when I tell him that my favorite book is Middlemarch, and i just want that feeling, the feeling I get with him, of having not gone wrong yet”

“My friend Simon managed only sixteen of the seventeen League games - he smashed his head on a bookshelf in London a few hours before the Grimsby game on the 28th of Decemebr; his girlfriend had to take his car keys away from him because he kept making dazed attempts to drive from Fulham up to the Abbey.”

“Needless to say, drink, drugs, food, and sex played no part in the festivities. But who needs any of that when you've got literature?”

“Nobody should have children just because it made the photo library on the computer more interesting.”

“A few years ago, Cindy joined one of those dreadful reading groups, where unhappy, repressed middle class lesbians talk for five minutes about some novel they don't understand and then spend the rest of the evening moaning about how dreadful men are.”

“Because it's a brilliant film. It's funny, and violent, and it's got Harvey Keitel and Tim Roth in it, and everything. And a cracking sound track.Maybe there's no comparison between Ian sleeping with Laura and Reservoir Dogs after all. Ian hasn't got Harvey Keitel and Tim Roth in him. And Ian's not funny. Or violent. And he's got a crap sound track, judging from what we used to hear through the ceiling. I've taken this as far as it will go.”

“Surely we all occasionally buy books because of a daydream we're having--a little fantasy about the people we might turn into one day, when our lives are different, quieter, more introspective, and when all the urgent reading, whatever that might be, has been done. We never arrive at that point, needless to say....”

“That was his mother. When she wasn't crying over the breakfast cereal, she was laughing about killing herself.”

“Will wrestled with his conscience, grappled it to the ground and sat on it until he couldn't hear a squeak out of it.”

“Kids must spend half their lives throwing things at the ducks in Regent's Park. How come he managed to pick a duck that pathetic?”

“It didn't help that I was never allowed to study anything remotely contemporary until the last year of university: there was never any sense of that leading to this. If anything, my education gave me the opposite impression, of an end to cultural history round about the time that Forster wrote A Passage to India. The quickest way to kill all love for the classics, I can see now, is to tell young people that nothing else maters, because then all they can do is look at them in a museum of literature, through glass cases. Don't touch! And don't think for a moment that they want to live in the same world as you! And so a lot of adult life -- if your hunger and curiosity haven't been squelched by your education -- is learning to join up the dots that you didn't even know were there.”