|
46d7df2
|
He was kind, he was single, he was vulnerable, he made her laugh (not always intentionally, true, but often enough). Every time she saw him, he seemed to have become a little more handsome.
|
|
love
|
Nick Hornby |
|
11ab94e
|
I have measured out my life in Arsenal fixtures, and any event of any significance has a footballing shadow.
|
|
|
Nick Hornby |
|
a93a46f
|
Tucker, please put him down," said Annie. "You're frightening Jackson." "He's not," said Jackson. "It's cool. I don't like that guy anyway. Punch him, Dad."
|
|
|
Nick Hornby |
|
cae2b53
|
It's love this and love that, but of course 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.
|
|
|
Nick Hornby |
|
cf0e282
|
You need as much ballast as possible to stop you floating away; you need people around you, things going on, otherwise life is like some film where the money ran out, and there are no sets, or locations, or supporting actors, and it's just one bloke on his own staring into the camera with nothing to do and nobody to speak to, and who'd believe in this character then? I've got to get more stuff, more clutter, more detail in here, because at ..
|
|
|
Nick Hornby |
|
4c34060
|
Barry, if I were to say to you that I haven't seen Reservoir Dogs yet, what would that mean?" Barry looks at me. "Just...come on, what would it mean to you? That sentence? 'I haven't seen Reservoir Dogs yet?'" "To me, it would mean that you're a liar. Either that or you've gone potty. You saw it twice. Once with Laura, once with me and Dick. We had that conversation about who killed Mr. Pink or whatever fucking color he was." "Yeah, yeah, I..
|
|
|
Nick Hornby |
|
05b98d4
|
Will restrained a desire to leap in at this point and tell her that an inability to hold down a relationship was indicative of an undervalued kind of moral courage, that only cool people screwed up.
|
|
|
Nick Hornby |
|
96bddf4
|
Maybe nobody went to see the Rolling Stones here in 1964,' said Ros. 'The dead shark was just too much fun.
|
|
shark
rolling-stones
|
Nick Hornby |
|
7d11264
|
What you don't ever catch a glimpse of on your wedding day - because how could you? - is that some days you will hate your spouse, that you will look at him and regret ever changing a word with him, let alone a ring and bodily fluids. And nor do you think about your husband waking up in the morning being someone you don't recognize. If anyone thought about any of these things, then no one would ever get married. In fact, the impulse to marr..
|
|
marriage
|
Nick Hornby |
|
bd3f765
|
Napravikh kafe - kaza toi. - V dzhezve. Dzhezveto be vazhno, inak ne bi go spomenal. D'nkan smiatashe, che prigotvianeto na istinsko kafe iziskva tv'rde mnogo shetnia s vsichkoto tam dozirane i chakane, i povtariashe, che neskafeto si mu kharesva. Zhest't mu ochevidno beshe znak na razkaianie za izneviarata mu. - Brei, mnogo s'm ti zad'lzhena. - Ne b'di takava. - Zashcho da me interesuva kakvo kafe piesh? - Ako ne biakh prespal s druga, sh..
|
|
|
Nick Hornby |
|
ec4bb5a
|
He could see why his mum chose (italicized) friends, instead of just putting up with anyone she happened to bump into, or sticking with people who supported the same football team, or wore the same clothes, which was pretty much happened at school; his must have conversations like this with Suzie, conversations that moved, conversations where each thing the other person said seemed to lead you on somewhere.
|
|
|
Nick Hornby |
|
b02083f
|
We laughed. Ha, ha, we went. Ha, ha, ha. I'm not laughing now. Never has a joke filled me with such nausea and paranoia and insecurity and self-pity and dread and doubt.
|
|
|
Nick Hornby |
|
d1adb32
|
Kids must spend half their lives throwing things at the ducks in Regent's Park. How come he managed to pick a duck that pathetic?
|
|
humor
life
|
Nick Hornby |
|
46116df
|
Thank you,' said Annie. 'Second thing : Juliet is brilliant. Don't lump the music in with the rest of it.' 'Have you been taking any of this in ?' 'Yes. You're a very bad man. You've been a useless father to four of your five children, and a useless husband to every single one of your wives, and a rubbish partner to every single one of your girlfriends? And Juliet is still brilliant.
|
|
|
Nick Hornby |
|
224b38c
|
The trick, it seems to me, is to stave off regret. That's what the whole thing is about. And we can't stave it off forever, because it is impossible not to make the mistakes that let regret in, but the best of us manage to limp on into our sixties or seventies before we succumb. Me, I made it to about thirty-seven, and David made it to the same age, and my brother gave up the ghost even before that. And I'm not sure that there is a cure for..
|
|
regret
|
Nick Hornby |
|
4f911d3
|
I decided, on the spot, to let God into my heart, in the hope that my newfound faith can somehow be used as a vicious weapon in the marital war.
|
|
marriage
religion
humor
|
Nick Hornby |
|
eab99a3
|
I have tried to live with women who share a similar sensibility to mine, with predictably disastrous consequences, but the opposite route seems every bit as hopeless.
|
|
|
Nick Hornby |
|
c8304e4
|
Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands, literally thousands, of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss. The unhappiest people I know, romantically speaking, are the ones who like pop music the most; and I don't know whether pop music has caused this unhappiness, but I do know that they've been listening to the sad songs longer than they've been living the unhappy lives.
|
|
|
Nick Hornby |
|
fa5b681
|
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?
|
|
|
Nick Hornby |
|
42c2602
|
I feel as though I have been having conversations like this all my life. None of us is young anymore, but what has just taken place could have happened when I was sixteen, or twenty, or twenty-five. We got to adolescence and just stopped dead; we drew up the map then and left the boundaries exactly as they were.
|
|
|
Nick Hornby |
|
e097d50
|
Does that help? Probably not, unless you are sane enough to believe that the truth about anyone is disappointing, the truth about me especially so.
|
|
|
Nick Hornby |
|
58ed660
|
He really liked this woman. Or, rather, he was really attracted to her, and nothing she had said so far had weakened the attraction.
|
|
|
Nick Hornby |
|
8481c17
|
A veces hemos de ser juzgados por nuestros actos unicos.
|
|
juicio
vida
|
Nick Hornby |
|
b1359f1
|
They were expressions of who he was and what he'd become, and he couldn't do anything about any of it, apart from retrace his steps back and back and back, until he was fifteen or ten or three years old, and start again.
|
|
|
Nick Hornby |
|
db36ca9
|
There was, he thought, an emotional truth here somewhere, and he could see now that his role-playing had a previously unsuspected artistic element to it. He was acting, yes, but in the noblest, most profound sense of the word. He wasn't a fraud. He was Robert De Niro.
|
|
|
Nick Hornby |
|
ae77d86
|
An official statement from Liverpool raised the spectre of a future where 'a club's rival can bring about a significant ban for a top player without anything beyond an accusation'. But on hearing this, many Manchester United fans would have been asking for a definition of the word 'rival'.
|
|
|
Nick Hornby |
|
3c2604e
|
Manchester City striker Mario Balotelli sets his own house on fire, apparently after letting off fireworks in his bathroom. Two days later City beat United 6-1, and after scoring the first goal Balotelli revealed a T-shirt bearing the question 'Why always me?' This was presumably intended to be rhetorical, but Cheshire Fire and Rescue service, who were at Balotelli's house until 2.45 a.m., could presumably have provided an answer.
|
|
|
Nick Hornby |
|
f8abf84
|
Thirty years on, things have changes to the extent that Wayne Rooney could comfortably afford to employ the best-paid banker in Britain full-time, if he could see any purpose or momentary amusement in doing so.
|
|
|
Nick Hornby |
|
f3660fd
|
For us it is not comparable, the FA Cup and Champions League,' Arsene Wenger said before Arsenal played Leeds in the FA Cup. 'The Champions League is compulsory. The FA Cup is something that is for enjoyment ... The basis of our life at the top level is dictated by the championship. If we can add on top of that the FA Cup it is fantastic.
|
|
|
Nick Hornby |
|
c17be1f
|
During the game, we find endless ways of saying that our team needs to score goals while at the same time not letting any in: 'We need a goal here,' 'We don't want to let one in now,' and so on. ('Here' and 'now' are the words intended to indicate a keen understanding of the complex nature of the particular game, but in truth they mean nothing. Teams always need to score, and never want to let one in.)
|
|
|
Nick Hornby |
|
928b6a7
|
During the season, fans tend to observe, in as many complicated ways and with as much detail as we can come up with, only that a winning team is very good, and a losing team is hopeless. My mother or Prince Charles or probably a Martian could make the same observation, but their views would be discounted on the grounds of ignorance.
|
|
|
Nick Hornby |
|
c13bc97
|
We are, a lot of the time, baffled by the news we see on the front pages of our newspapers, often because the stories are complex, and we missed the beginning of them anyway. (How far back do we have to go to find the roots of the Euro crisis? To 2008? 1999, when the currency came into being? 1992? 1945?) That is one of the reasons why natural disasters and murders and cases involving missing children become so involving: we understand them..
|
|
|
Nick Hornby |
|
b91a133
|
Even Tucker's way of not living could be described as living, if you had a crush on him.)
|
|
|
Nick Hornby |
|
75a90a8
|
Manchester United would have retained the Premiership if they'd won this game - or, of course, if they'd won any of the other games they drew during the course of the season. Or, seeing as one extra point would have done the trick, if they'd drawn any of the games they lost, especially the two against Manchester City. Or, seeing as they lost the trophy on goal difference, if their victories had been achieved with a bigger winning margin.
|
|
|
Nick Hornby |
|
da62a03
|
It didn't help that I was never allowed to study anything remotely contemporary until the last year of university: there was never any sense of leading to . If anything, my education gave me the opposite impression, of an end to cultural history round about the time that Forster wrote . The quickest way to kill all love for the classics, I can see now, is to tell young people that nothing else maters, because then all they can do is loo..
|
|
literature
|
Nick Hornby |
|
d69ee45
|
I couldn't have written because I--and I'm not alone, by any means--do not have Carey's breadth of reading, nor his calm, wry logic, which enables him to demolish the arguments of just about everyone who has ever talked tosh about objective aesthetic principles. And this group, it turns out, includes anyone who has ever talked about objective aesthetic principles.
|
|
|
Nick Hornby |
|
0845b85
|
Sitting at the table with the kids, and being told off like a kid, has liberated me; my disenfranchisement has empowered me.
|
|
|
Nick Hornby |
|
40a3161
|
You may think that you don't want to read about the problems of being brought up Mennonite, but the great thing about books is that you'll read anything a good writer wants you to read.
|
|
writers
|
Nick Hornby |
|
023938b
|
I've had countless conversations with or about people who are "sleeping in separate bedrooms", as if sleeping in the same bed is all there is to staying married, but however bad things get, sharing a bed has never been problematic; it's the rest of life that horrifies."
|
|
|
Nick Hornby |
|
53e2fed
|
writers never felt they belonged anywhere. That was one of the reasons they became writers.
|
|
|
Nick Hornby |
|
7d09b3f
|
Nobody should have children just because it made the photo library on the computer more interesting.
|
|
|
Nick Hornby |
|
4a185da
|
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. The unhappiest people I know, romantically speaking, are the ones who like pop music the most; and I don't know whether pop music has caused th..
|
|
|
Nick Hornby |
|
ba48dcc
|
There were only seven years between the first and last Beatles albums. That's nothing, seven years, when you think of how their hairstyles changed and their music changed. Some bands now go seven years without hardly bothering to do anything.
|
|
time
change
music
seven-years
hairstyles
the-beatles
|
Nick Hornby |
|
9a87062
|
In the end I value literacy more highly than health; if our two countries were full of fat readers, rather than millions of Victoria Beckhams, then we would all be better off.
|
|
|
Nick Hornby |