Nick Hornby citations

Page 2

“I don't believe in Heaven or anything. But I want to be the kind of person that qualifies for entry anyway.”

“my friends don't seem to be friends at all but people whose phone numbers I haven't lost.”

“When your sad--like really sad--you only want to be with other people who are sad.”

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

“I fell in love with football as I was later to fall in love with women: suddenly, inexplicably, uncritically, giving no thought to the pain or disruption it would bring with it.”

“That’s why; he’s worried about how his life is turning out, and he’s lonely, and lonely people are the bitterest of them all”

“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.”

“One day, maybe not in the next few weeks, but certainly in the conceivable future, someone will be able to refer to me without using the word 'arse' somewhere in the sentence.”

“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.”

“In other words, it's one of those books you thrust on your partner with an incredulous cry of "This is me!”

“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 don't even feel as if I'm the center of my own world, so how am I supposed to feel as though I'm the center of anyone else's?”

“The truth about life was that nothing ever ended until you died, and even then you just left a whole bunch of unresolved narratives behind you.”

“I miss him like one might miss a scar, or wooden leg, something disfiguring but characteristic.”

“I hate time. It never does what you want it to.”

“There are many differences between a baby and an I-Pod. And one of the biggest is, no ones going to mug you for your baby.”

“So it's not about what you do. It can't be, can it? It has to be about how you are, how you love, how you treat yourself and those around you, and that's where I get eaten up.”

“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.”

“It's just that none of us had the wit or talent to make them into songs. We made them into life, which much messier, and more time consuming, and leaves nothing for anybody to whistle.”

“I suddenly had a little epiphany: all the books we own, both read and unread, are the fullest expression of self we have at our disposal.”

“He's at the chocolate teapot end of the competency scale.”

“She thought I was… soulful, by which I think she means that I don't say much and I always look vaguely pissed off.”

“I would like my personal reading map to resemble a map of the British Empire circa 1900.”

“It is the act of reading itself that I miss, the opportunity to retreat further and further from the world until I have found some space, some air that isn't stale, that hasn't been breathed by my family a thousand times already.”

“One has so many more opinions about what has gone wrong than about what is perfect.”

“… So please, be tolerant of those who describe a sporting moment as their best ever. We do not lack imagination, nor have we had sad and barren lives; it is just that real life is paler, duller, and contains less potential for unexpected delirium.”