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56789d4
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People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands - literally thousands - of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss.
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sad
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Nick Hornby |
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333d6f9
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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.
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Nick Hornby |
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e0f441c
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All the books we own, both read and unread, are the fullest expression of self we have at our disposal. ... But with each passing year, and with each whimsical purchase, our libraries become more and more able to articulate who we are, whether we read the books or not.
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individuality
identity
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Nick Hornby |
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3b129a8
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I don't know you. The only thing I know about you is, you're reading this. I don't know if your happy or not; I don't know whether you're young or not. I sort of hope you're young and sad. If you're old and happy, I can imagine that you'll smile to yourself when you hear me going, he broke my heart. You'll remember someone who broke your heart, and you'll think to yourself, Oh yes, i remember how that feels. But you can't, you smug old git...
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Nick Hornby |
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daceaa9
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How do people, like, not curse? How is it possible? There are these gaps in speech where you just have to put a "fuck." I'll tell you who the most admirable people in the world are: newscasters. If that was me, I'd be like, "And the motherfuckers flew the fucking plane right into the Twin Towers." How could you not, if you're a human being? Maybe they're not so admirable. Maybe they're robot zombies."
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swearing
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Nick Hornby |
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0a62771
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A man who wants to die feels angry and full of life and desperate and bored and exhausted, all at the same time; he wants to fight everyone, and he wants to curl up in a ball and hide in a cupboard somewhere. He wants to say sorry to everyone, and he wants everyone to know just how badly they've all let him down.
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Nick Hornby |
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196e7cc
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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.
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life
problems
starting-over
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Nick Hornby |
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be7230f
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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 ...
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Nick Hornby |
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c51b29b
|
Sarcasm and compassion are two of the qualities that make life on Earth tolerable.
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Nick Hornby |
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ebd7b70
|
It's brilliant, being depressed; you can behave as badly as you like.
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Nick Hornby |
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a78d54c
|
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.
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Nick Hornby |
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28298b6
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Everyone knows how to talk, and no one knows what to say.
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Nick Hornby |
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0a0ac5c
|
I've committed to nothing...and that's just suicide...by tiny, tiny increments.
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fiction
personal-insight
rob-gordon
dark-humor
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Nick Hornby |
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39f009b
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Over the last couple of years, the photos of me when I was a kid... well, they've started to give me a little pang or something - not unhappiness, exactly, but some kind of quiet, deep regret... I keep wanting to apologize to the little guy: "I'm sorry, I've let you down. I was the person who was supposed to look after you, but I blew it: I made wrong decisions at bad times, and I turned you into me."
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regret
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Nick Hornby |
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1ed4eb8
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I'm very good at the past. It's the present I can't understand.
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Nick Hornby |
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29bc2bc
|
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...
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life
survival
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Nick Hornby |
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e26befa
|
Those days are gone, and good fucking riddance to them; unhappiness really meant something back then. Now it's just a drag, like a cold or having no money. If you really wanted to mess me up, you should have got to me earlier.
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hurt
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Nick Hornby |
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6d2f925
|
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.
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poetry
humanity
love
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Nick Hornby |
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214e4a2
|
I read the fuck out of every book I can get my hands on.
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reading
humor
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Nick Hornby |
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297fa48
|
Maybe we all live life at too high a pitch, those of us who absorb emotional things all day, and as mere consequence we can never feel merely content: we have to be unhappy, or ecstatically, head-over-heels happy, and those states are difficult to achieve within a stable, solid relationship.
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Nick Hornby |
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73e2107
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If you really wanted to mess me up, you should have got to me earlier.
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Nick Hornby |
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d979bc2
|
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.
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Nick Hornby |
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493b524
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The trouble with my generation is that we all think we're fucking geniuses. Making something isn't good enough for us, and neither is selling something, or teaching something, or even just doing something; we have to something.
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Nick Hornby |
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25ce871
|
I've had a bad week." What's happened?" Nothing's happened. I've had a bad week in my head, is all."
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Nick Hornby |
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6c09878
|
I've been thinking with my guts since I was fourteen years old, and frankly speaking, between you and me, I have come to the conclusion that my guts have shit for brains.
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Nick Hornby |
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0b3b1a1
|
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.
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Nick Hornby |
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63ddfc4
|
Even bad times have good things in them to make you feel alive.
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Nick Hornby |
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0786380
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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.
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Nick Hornby |
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375e63f
|
When you're unhappy, I guess everything in the world - reading, eating, sleeping - has something buried somewhere inside it that just makes you unhappier.
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Nick Hornby |
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14ddaa9
|
Have you got any soul?" a woman asks the next afternoon. That depends, I feel like saying; some days yes, some days no. A few days ago I was right out; now I've got loads, too much, more than I can handle. I wish I could spread it a bit more evenly, I want to tell her, get a better balance, but I can't seem to get it sorted. I can see she wouldn't be interested in my internal stock control problems though, so I simply point to where I keep ..
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character
sadness
music
personal
soul
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Nick Hornby |
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d3d8341
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Please stop patronizing those who are reading a book - The Da Vinci Code, maybe- because they are enjoying it. For a start, none of us know what kind of an effort this represents for the individual reader. It could be his or her first full-length adult novel; it might be the book that finally reveals the purpose and joy of reading to someone who has hitherto been mystified by the attraction books exert on others. And anyway, reading for enj..
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Nick Hornby |
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31eeae3
|
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.
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Nick Hornby |
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104b7a9
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I used to think--and given the way we ended up, maybe I still do--that all relationships need the kind of violent shove that a crush brings, just to get you started and to push you over the humps. And then, when the energy from that shove has gone and you come to something approaching a halt, you have to look around and see what you've got. It could be something completely different, it could be something roughly the same, but gentler and c..
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Nick Hornby |
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83e8d2a
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That's the thing with the young these days, isn't it? They watch too many happy endings. Everything has to be wrapped up, with a smile and a tear and a wave. Everyone has learned, found love, seen the error of their ways, discovered the joys of monogamy, or fatherhood, or filial duty, or life itself. In my day, people got shot at the end of films, after learning only that life is hollow, dismal, brutish, and short.
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Nick Hornby |
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038c798
|
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.
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depression
life
inspirational
adversity
hard-times
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Nick Hornby |
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a2cb713
|
One could argue that most of the trouble in the world is caused by introspection.
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Nick Hornby |
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a4ca813
|
For alarmingly large chunks of an average day, I am a moron.
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Nick Hornby |
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9a7ef44
|
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.
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Nick Hornby |
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5b22e8c
|
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.
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Nick Hornby |
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a551dd7
|
A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do. You've got to kick off with a corker, to hold the attention (I started with 'Got To Get You Off My Mind', but then realised that she might not get any further than track one, side one if I delivered what she wanted straight away, so I buried it in the middle of side two), and then you've got to up it a notch, and you can't have white music and black music together, unless the white m..
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Nick Hornby |
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27eb522
|
What came first, the music or the misery? People worry about kids playing with guns, or watching violent videos, that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands, literally thousands of songs about heartbreak, rejection, pain, misery and loss. Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?"- Rob"
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Nick Hornby |
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352c98c
|
Is it wrong, wanting to be at home with your record collection? It's not like collecting records is like collecting stamps, or beermats, or antique thimbles. There's a whole world in here, a nicer, dirtier, more violent, more peaceful, more colorful, sleazier, more dangerous, more loving world than the world I live in; there is history, and geography, and poetry, and countless other things I should have studied at school, including music.
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Nick Hornby |
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84ef988
|
my friends don't seem to be friends at all but people whose phone numbers I haven't lost.
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life
|
Nick Hornby |
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d50c9b5
|
And another way of explaining it is to say that shit happens, and there's no space too small, too dark and airless and fucking hopeless, for people to crawl into.
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life
hopeless
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Nick Hornby |