Nick Hornby citations

“It's brilliant, being depressed; you can behave as badly as you like.”

“You don't ask people with knives in their stomachs what would make them happy; happiness is no longer the point. It's all about survival; it's all about whether you pull the knife out and bleed to death or keep it in…”

“It's a mystery of human chemistry and I don't understand it, some people, as far as their senses are concerned, just feel like home.”

“The truth will set you free. Either that or it'll get you a punch in the nose.”

“There isn't so much to be afraid of, out there. I can remember thinking it was funny to find that out, on the last night of my life; I'd spent the rest of it being afraid of everything.”

“You're not allowed to say anything about books because they're books, and books are, you know, God.”

“It's no good pretending that any relationship has a future if your record collections disagree violently or if your favorite films wouldn't even speak to each other if they met at a party.”

“What came first – the music or the misery? Did I listen to the music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to the music? Do all those records turn you into a melancholy person?”

“I love the relationship that anyone has with music… because there's something in us that is beyond the reach of words, something that eludes and defies our best attempts to spit it out…. It's the best part of us probably…”

“Hard is trying to rebuild yourself, piece by piece, with no instruction book, and no clue as to where all the important bits are supposed to go.”

“Sarcasm and compassion are two of the qualities that make life on Earth tolerable.”

“Everyone knows how to talk, and no one knows what to say.”

“Sentimental music has this great way of taking you back somewhere at the same time that it takes you forward, so you feel nostagic and hopeful all at the same time.”

“I've committed to nothing… and that's just suicide… by tiny, tiny increments.”

“I'm very good at the past. It's the present I can't understand.”

“It seems to me now that the plain state of being human is dramatic enough for anyone; you don't need to be a heroin addict or a performance poet to experience extremity. You just have to love someone.”

“If you really wanted to mess me up, you should have got to me earlier.”

“Telling me I can do anything I want is like pulling the plug out of the bath and then telling the water it can go anywhere it wants. Try it, and see what happens.”

“We spent all those years talking about stuff we had in common, and the last few months noticing all the ways we were different and it broke both of our hearts.”

“…I've had a bad week."
What's happened?"
Nothing's happened. I've had a bad week in my head, is all.”

“I lost the plot for a while then. And I lost the subplot, the script, the soundtrack, the intermission, my popcorn, the credits, and the exit sign.”

“Even bad times have good things in them to make you feel alive.”

“When you're unhappy, I guess everything in the world - reading, eating, sleeping - has something buried somewhere inside it that just makes you unhappier.”

“Love, it turns out, is as undemocratic as money, so it accumulates around people who have plenty of it already: the sane, the healthy, the lovable.”

“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.”

“One could argue that most of the trouble in the world is caused by introspection.”

“For alarmingly large chunks of an average day, I am a moron.”

“It's no wonder we're all such a mess, is it? We're like Tom Hanks in Big. Little boys and girls trapped in adult bodies and forced to get on with it.”

“Most people have a rope that ties them to someone, and that rope can be short or it can be long. (Be long. Belong. Get it?) You don't know how long, though. It's not your choice.”