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7dbc8b2
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The truth will set you free. Either that or it'll get you a punch in the nose.
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Nick Hornby |
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9088373
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And it isn't that I'm so unhappy I don't want to live anymore. That's not what it feels like. It feels more like I'm tired and bored and the party's gone on too long and I want to go home. I feel flat and there doesn't seem to be anything to look forward to, so I'd rather call it a day.
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Nick Hornby |
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d45b4d9
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I don't believe in Heaven or anything. But I want to be the kind of person that qualifies for entry anyway.
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Nick Hornby |
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98c4fa4
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Books are, let's face it, better than everything else. If we played cultural Fantasy Boxing League, and made books go 15 rounds in the ring against the best that any other art form had to offer, then books would win pretty much every time. Go on, try it. "The Magic Flute" v. Middlemarch? Middlemarch in six. "The Last Supper" v. Crime and Punishment? Fyodor on points. See? I mean, I don't know how scientific this is, but it feels like the no..
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Nick Hornby |
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99af692
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Once you stop pretending that everything's shitty and you can't wait to get out of it...then it gets more painful, not less. Telling yourself life is shit is like an anesthetic, and when you stop taking the Advil, then you really can tell how much it hurts, and where, and it's not like that kind of pain does anyone a whole lot of good.
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Nick Hornby |
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1cc2210
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Did I do and say these things? Yes, I did. Are there any mitigating circumstances? Not really, unless any circumstances {in other words, context) can be regarded as mitigating. And before you judge, although you have probably already done so, go away and write down the four worst things you have done to a partner, even if - especially if - your partner doesn't know about them. Don't dress things up, or try to explain them; just write them d..
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love
mistakes
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Nick Hornby |
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43a3fdb
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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.
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humour
life
fooball
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Nick Hornby |
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82b70a5
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Human beings are millions of things in one day.
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Nick Hornby |
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de88f37
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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
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Nick Hornby |
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f32f445
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About Love)The most important thing in life, and you can't tell whether people have it or not. Surely this is wrong? Surely people who are happy should look happy, at all times, no matter how much money they have or how uncomfortable their shoes are or how little their child is sleeping; and people who are doing OK but have still not found their soul-mate should look, I don't know, anxious, like Billy Crystal in When Harry Met Sally; and pe..
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love
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Nick Hornby |
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dca66c2
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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.
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Nick Hornby |
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da7f2db
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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.
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love
nick-hornby
self-hate
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Nick Hornby |
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4c26aa3
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Because music, like color, or a cloud, is neither intelligent nor unintelligent - it just is. The chord, the simplest building block for even the tritest, silliest chart song, is a beautiful, perfect, mysterious thing, and when an ill-read, uneducated, uncultured, emotionally illiterate boor puts a couple of them together, he has every chance of creating something wonderful and powerful. All I ask of music is that is sounds good.
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Nick Hornby |
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cd57163
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about suicide] And why is it the biggest sin of all? All your life you're told that you'll be going to this marvellous place when you pass on. And the one thing you can do to get you there a bit quicker is something that stops you getting there at all. Oh, I can see that it's a kind of queuejumping. But if someone jumps the queue at the Post Office, people tut. Or sometimes they say, "Excuse me, I was here first." They don't say, "You will ..
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Nick Hornby |
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27a1827
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It would be nice to think that as I've got older times have changed, relationships have become more sophisticated, females less cruel, skins thicker, reactions sharper, instincts more developed. But there still seems to be an element of that evening in everything that happened to me since; all my other romantic stories seem to be a scrambled version of that first one. Of course, I have never had to take that long walk again, and my ears hav..
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pain
young-love
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Nick Hornby |
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fa44099
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Look at all the things that can go wrong for men. There's the nothing-happening-at-all problem, the too-much-happening-too-soon problem, the dismal-droop-after-a-promising-beginning problem; there's the size-doesn't-matter-except-in-my-case problem, the failing-to-deliver-the-goods problem...and what do women have to worry about? A handful of cellulite? Join the club. A spot of I-wonder-how-I-rank? Ditto.
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sex
man
men
humour
humor
hornby
nick-hornby
manly
manliness
nick
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Nick Hornby |
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31adc3e
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Sometimes it's moments like that, real complicated moments, absorbing moments, that make you realize that even hard times have things in them that make you feel alive. And then there's music, and girls, and drugs, and homeless people who've read Pauline Kael, and wah-wah pedals, and English potato chip flavors, and I haven't even read Martin Chuzzlewit yet... There's plenty out there.
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Nick Hornby |
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a06e74e
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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.
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Nick Hornby |
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90197a6
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That is another chamber of my heart that shows no electrical activity - the chamber that used to flicker into life when I saw a film that moved me, or read a book that inspired me, or listened to music that made me want to cry. I closed that chamber myself, for all the usual reasons. And now I seem to have made a pact with some philistine devil: if I don't attempt to re-open it, I will be allowed just enough energy and optimism to get throu..
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life
growing
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Nick Hornby |
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84fc6b0
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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?
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Nick Hornby |
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a9d9863
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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.
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Nick Hornby |
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cc3292b
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I don't want anyone writing in to point out that I spend too much money on books, many of which I will never read. I know that already. I certainly intend to read all of them, more or less. My intentions are good. Anyway, it's my money. And I'll bet you do it too.
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Nick Hornby |
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04f4f29
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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.
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Nick Hornby |
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c4fc352
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People go on about places like Starbucks being unpersonal and all that, but what if that's what you want? I'd be lost if people like that got their way and there was nothing unpersonal in the world. I like to know that there are big places without windows where no one gives a shit. You need confidence to go into small places with regular customers... I'm happiest in the Virgin Megastore and Borders and Starbucks and Pizza Express, where no ..
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down
way
long
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Nick Hornby |
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4f7141c
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In other words, it's one of those books you thrust on your partner with an incredulous cry of "This is me!" --
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marriage
reading
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Nick Hornby |
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151c93a
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Loving people, and allowing yourself to be loved, was only worth the risk if the odds were in your favor, but they quite clearly weren't. There were about seventy-nine squillion people in the world, and if you were very lucky, you would end up being loved by fifteen or twenty of them. So how smart did you have to be to work out that it just wasn't worth the risk?
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Nick Hornby |
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fa0034d
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I was still owed an explanation, I thought, but so what? What good was it going to do me? It wouldn't have made me any happier. It was like scratching when you have chicken pox. You think it's going to help, but the itch moves over, and then moves over again. My itch suddenly felt miles away, and I couldn't have reached it with the longest arms in the world. Realizing that made me scared that I was going to be itchy forever, and I didn't wa..
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Nick Hornby |
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585a0a1
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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.
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romance
sadness
music
pop
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Nick Hornby |
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4ba35d5
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I'm human. That's how humans spend their time, doing shitty things.
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Nick Hornby |
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6f95637
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I hate time. It never does what you want it to.
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Nick Hornby |
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6db84e3
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I'd stay there, or not, and I'd eat, or not, and I'd drink, or not, and go home, or not, and what I did or didn't do wouldn't matter to anyone at all. And I walked for most of the day. Do people get sad on holiday sometimes? I can imagine they do, having all that time to think.
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Nick Hornby |
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aa6efda
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And what would happen if we never read the classics? There comes a point in life, it seems to me, where you have to decide whether you're a Person of Letters or merely someone who loves books, and I'm beginning to see that the book lovers have more fun.
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reading
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Nick Hornby |
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10d8eb8
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The point is you keep going. You want to. So all the things that make you want to are the point.
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Nick Hornby |
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c96bc19
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I remembered what it is I like about sex: what I like about sex is that I can lose myself in it entirely. Sex, in fact, is the most absorbing activity I have discovered in adulthood. When I was a child I used to feel this way about all sorts of things--Legos, The Jungle Book, The Hardy Boys, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Saturday morning cartoons...I could forget where I was, the time of day, who I was with. Sex is the only thing I've found like..
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Nick Hornby |
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525053a
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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.
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Nick Hornby |
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f30a609
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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.
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Nick Hornby |
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a11553d
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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.
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Nick Hornby |
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486201c
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We get together with people because they're the same or because they're different, and in the end we split with them for exactly the same reasons.
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Nick Hornby |
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024177f
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A while back, when Dick & Barry & I agreed that what really matters is what you like, not what you *are* like, Barry proposed the idea of a questionnaire for potential partners, a 2 or 3 page multiple-choice document that covered all the music/film/TV/book bases. It was intended: a) to dispense with awkward conversation, and b) to prevent a chap from leaping into bed with someone who might, at a later date, turn out to have every Julio Igle..
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relationships
music
movies
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Nick Hornby |
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4df39b2
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There's nothing you can't fuck up if you try hard enough.
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Nick Hornby |
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2977ff8
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A middle-aged woman who looked like someone's cleaning lady, a shrieking adolescent lunatic and a talkshow host with an orange face... It didn't add up. Suicide wasn't invented for people like this. It was invented for people like Virginia Woolf and Nick Drake. And Me. Suicide was supposed to be cool.
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suicide
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Nick Hornby |
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1f28858
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He's at the chocolate teapot end of the competency scale.
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Nick Hornby |
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67f7641
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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.
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Nick Hornby |
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80bc529
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She thought I was...soulful, by which I think she means that I don't say much and I always look vaguely pissed off.
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Nick Hornby |