Nick Hornby: Thing

“There had been times when he knew, somewhere in him, that he would get used to it, whatever it was, because he had learnt that some hard things became softer after a very little while.”

“Human beings are millions of things in one day.”

“This thing about looking for someone less different… It only really worked, he realized, if you were convinced that being you wasn't so bad in the first place.”

“Maybe the best thing to do with favorite books is to leave them be: to achieve such exalted position means that they entered your life at exactly the right time, in precisely the right place, and those conditions can never be recreated.”

“I have always been accused of taking the things I love - football, of course, but also books and records - much too seriously, and I do feel a kind of anger when I hear a bad record, or when someone is lukewarm about a book that means a lot to me.”

“For the best part of 40 years she had genuinely believed that not doing things would somehow prevent regret, when, of course, the exact opposite was true.”

“You know that things aren't going well for you when you can't even tell people the simplest fact about your life, just because they'll presume you're asking them to feel sorry for you.”

“I'm human. That's how humans spend their time, doing shitty things.”

“The point is you keep going. You want to. So all the things that make you want to are the point.”

“Do you ever do that thing where you lie in bed and you can't sleep so you end up writing out recent conversation you've had? So they look like a play?'

Well you should. It's fun. I keep them. Look through them, sometimes.”

“One thing about great art: it made you love people more, forgive them their petty transgressions. It worked in the way that religion was supposed to, if you thought about it.”

“When you get older, it feels like happy memories and sad memories are pretty much the same thing. It is all just emotion in the end. And any of it can make you weep.”