Nick Hornby citations

Page 3

“It struck him that how you spent Christmas was a message to the world about where you were in life, some indication of how deep a hole you had managed to burrow for yourself”

“You had to live in your own bubble. You couldn't force your way into someone else's, because then it wouldn't be a bubble any more.”

“You wouldn't believe that so much could change just because a relationship ended.”

“So now what? What happens when words fail us?”

“The non-fiction bestseller lists frequently prove that we all want to know more about everything, even if we didn't know that we wanted to know - we're just waiting for the right person to come along and tell us about it.”

“And mostly all I have to say about these songs is that I love them, and want to sing along to them, and force other people to listen to them, and get cross when these other people don't like them as much as I do.”

“The outward manifestations of an inner combustion are never very directed.”

“Books are, let's face it, better than everything else.”

“Books are, let's face it, better than everything else. If we played Cultural Fantasy Boxing League, and made books go fifteen rounds in the ring against the best that any other art form had to offer, then books would win pretty much every time.”

“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.”

“What went wrong? Nothing and everything.”

“Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.”

“[…] falling in love with someone beautiful and intelligent and the rest of it, then feeling like a blank twit put you at something of a disadvantage.”

“What really matters is what you like, not what you are like”

“No man is an island…”

“… I feel as though I made a face and the wind changed, and now I have to go through life grimacing in this horrible way.”

“It's just that romance, with its dips and turns and glooms and highs, its swoops and swoons and blues, is a natural metaphor for music itself”

“To me, making a tape is like writing a letter – there's a lot of erasing and rethinking and starting again, and I wanted it to be a good one.”

“It's music rage, which is like road rage, only more righteous. When you get road rage, a tiny part of you knows you're being a jerk, but when you get music rage, you're carrying out the will of God, and God wants these people dead”

“I guess I should have forgotten about it ages ago, but forgetting isn't something I'm very good at.”

“It's love this and love that but of couse it's so easy to love someone you don't know, whether it's George Clooney or Monkey. Staying civil to someone with whom you've ever shared Christmas turkey- now there's a miracle.”

“Phone calls like ours only happen when you've spent several years hurting and being hurt, until every work you utter or hear becomes coded and loaded, as complicated and full of subtext as a bleak and brilliant play.”

“But then, that was the trouble with relationships generally. They had their own temperature and there was no thermostat.”

“It takes a child to say the unsayable.”

“You have to work at relationships. You can’t just walk out on them every time something goes wrong.”

“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.”

“Barry, you're over thirty years old. You owe it to your mum and dad not to sing in a group called Sonic Death Monkey.”

“I'm not telling you that suicidal people aren't so far away from people who can get by; I'm telling you that people who can get by aren't so far away from being suicidal.”

“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.”