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8d035c7
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A couple of months ago, I became depressed by the realization that I'd forgotten pretty much everything I've ever read. I have, however, bounced back: I am now cheered by the realization that if I've forgotten everything I've ever read then I can read some of my favorite books again .
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Nick Hornby |
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976b922
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It's only just beginning to occur to me that it's important to have something going on somewhere, at work or at home, otherwise you're just clinging on. [...] 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 guy on his own staring into the camera wi..
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Nick Hornby |
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a9bf44f
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I would like my personal reading map to resemble a map of the British Empire circa 1900.
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reading
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Nick Hornby |
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e8ebde7
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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
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humour
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Nick Hornby |
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b287aac
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Being a reader is sort of like being president, except reading involves fewer state dinners, usually. You have this agenda you want to get through, but you get distracted by life events, e.g., books arriving in the mail/World War III, and you are temporarily deflected from your chosen path.
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Nick Hornby |
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da2966e
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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.
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Nick Hornby |
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4434b7b
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I may not know the weight of those things, but I could feel the weight of that one, so I kept it to myself. 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 suppose it's why you feel so far away from everyone, in the end; anything you can think of to tell them just ends up making them feel terrible.
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Nick Hornby |
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401423f
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Why is failure the first thing I think of when I find myself in this sort of situation? Why can't I just enjoy myself? But if you have to ask the question, then you know you're lost: self-consciousness is a man's worst enemy. Already I'm wondering whether she's as aware of my erection as I am...
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Nick Hornby |
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8632e1b
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Because . . . most of us think that the point is something to do with work, or kids, or family, or whatever. But you don't have any of that. There's nothing between you and despair, and you don't seem a very desperate person.' 'Too stupid.' 'You're not stupid. So why don't you ever put your head in the oven?' 'I don't know. There's always a new Nirvana album to look forward to, or something happening in NYPD Blue to make you want to watc..
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suicide
life-lessons
humor
simplicity
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Nick Hornby |
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b272ddf
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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.
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life
sport
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Nick Hornby |
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f33249f
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There isn't so much to be afraid of, out there. I can remember thinking it was funny to find that out, on the last night of my life; I'd spent the rest of it being afraid of everything.
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suicide
life-and-living
living
life
living-life
living-life-to-the-fullest
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Nick Hornby |
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40414d3
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One has so many more opinions about what has gone wrong than about what is perfect.
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Nick Hornby |
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7d03d0a
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You wouldn't believe that so much could change just because a relationship ended.
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relationships
change
nick-hornby
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Nick Hornby |
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16dad1d
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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.
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relationships
nick-hornby
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Nick Hornby |
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5ab5088
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Books are, let's face it, better than everything else.
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Nick Hornby |
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c3269e5
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Hey, great idea: if you have kids, give your partner reading vouchers next Christmas. Each voucher entitles the bearer to two hours' reading time *while the kids are awake*. It might look like a cheapskate present, but parents will appreciate that it costs more in real terms than a Lamborghini.
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reading
parenting
gifts
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Nick Hornby |
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99834bb
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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 fifteen rounds in the ring against the best that any other art form had to offer, then books would win pretty much every time.
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reading
humor
love-of-reading
culture
sports
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Nick Hornby |
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ca6713a
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The fuck?" he said. "The fuck?" said Jess. "The fuck what?" "It's an American abbreviation," said Martin. " <> means <> In America, they're so busy that they don't have time to say the <>."
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Nick Hornby |
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9adc65c
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The outward manifestations of an inner combustion are never very directed.
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Nick Hornby |
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58b6b04
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So now what? What happens when words fail us?
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Nick Hornby |
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b528640
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What went wrong? Nothing and everything.
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Nick Hornby |
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6fffeb9
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The truth about autobiographical songs, he realized, was that you had to make the present become the past, somehow: you had to take a feeling or a friend or a woman and turn whatever it was into something that was over, so that you could be definitive about it. You had to put it in a glass case and look at it and think about it until it gave up its meaning.
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Nick Hornby |
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8b90e4c
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I used to believe, although I don't now, that growing and growing up are analogous, that both are inevitable and uncontrollable processes. Now it seems to me that growing up is governed by the will, that one can choose to become an adult, but only at given moments. These moments come along fairly infrequently -during crises in relationships, for example, or when one has been given the chance to start afresh somewhere- and one can ignore the..
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life
football
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Nick Hornby |
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7d153a6
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Marcus couldn't believe it. Dead. A dead duck. OK, he'd been trying to hit it on the head with a piece of sandwich, but he tried to do all sorts of things, and none of them had ever happened before. He'd tried to get the highest score on the Stargazer machine in the kabab shop on Hornsey road - nothing. He'd tried to read Nicky's thoughts by staring at the back of his head every maths lesson for a week - nothing. It really annoyed him that ..
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funny
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Nick Hornby |
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378ae74
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Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.
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Nick Hornby |
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b6e7bca
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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.
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Nick Hornby |
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fbffef8
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I know, somewhere in me, that it's not her that's being stupid. I understand, on one level, that she doesn't know, that everything's up in the air. But that's no use to me. You know the worst thing about being rejected? The lack of control. If you could only control the when and how of being dumped by somebody, then it wouldn't seem as bad. But then, of course, it wouldn't be rejection, would it? It would be by mutual consent. It would be m..
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Nick Hornby |
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53589f5
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Read any women's magazine and you'll see the same complaint over and over again: men - those little boys ten or twenty or thirty years on - are hopeless in bed. They are not interested in "foreplay"; they have no desire to stimulate the erogenous zones of the opposite sex; they are selfish, greedy, clumsy, unsophisticated. These complaints, you can't help feeling, are ironic. Back then, all we wanted was foreplay, and girls weren't interest..
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Nick Hornby |
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298d313
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As I get older, the tyranny that football exerts over my life, and therefore over the lives of people around me, is less reasonable and less attractive. Family and friends know, after long years of wearying experience, that the fixture list always has the last word in any arrangement; they understand, or at least accept, that christenings or weddings or any gatherings, which in other families would take unquestioned precedence, can only be ..
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soccer
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Nick Hornby |
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dc2233e
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What really matters is what you like, not what you are like
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Nick Hornby |
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ad48c5e
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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.
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Nick Hornby |
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5e1beaf
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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.
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love
nick-hornby
self-hate
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Nick Hornby |
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933f25c
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Where would David Copperfield be if Dickens had gone to writing classes? Probably about seventy minor characters short, is where. (Did you know that Dickens is estimated to have invented thirteen thousand characters? Thirteen thousand! The population of a small town!)
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writing
humor
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Nick Hornby |
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755a4d1
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I guess I should have forgotten about it ages ago, but forgetting isn't something I'm very good at.
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Nick Hornby |
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5e40369
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But then, that was the trouble with relationships generally. They had their own temperature and there was no thermostat.
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Nick Hornby |
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4891838
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No man is an island...
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Nick Hornby |
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d8c4b50
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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
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Nick Hornby |
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1d6c73d
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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.
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Nick Hornby |
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19b1765
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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.
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Nick Hornby |
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a2a4bc5
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It takes a child to say the unsayable.
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Nick Hornby |
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ca3d27a
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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.
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Nick Hornby |
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c431345
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Anyone and everyone taking a writing class knows that the secret of good writing is to cut it back, pare it down, winnow, chop, hack, prune, and trim, remove every superfluous word, compress, compress, compress... Actually, when you think about it, not many novels in the Spare tradition are terribly cheerful. Jokes you can usually pluck out whole, by the roots, so if you're doing some heavy-duty prose-weeding, they're the first to go. And t..
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writing
work
humor
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Nick Hornby |
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aed45fb
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Everyone disliked their partners at some time or another, she knew that. But she'd spent her hours in the dark wondering whether she'd ever liked him. Would it really have been so much worse to spend those years alone? Why did there have to be someone else in the room while she was eating, watching TV, sleeping?
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relationships
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Nick Hornby |
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4745f7c
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Tuesday night I reorganized my record collection. I often do this at periods of emotional stress. There are some people who would find this a pretty dull way to spend an evening, but I'm not one of them. This is my life, and it's nice to be able to wade in it, immerse your arms in it, touch it.
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Nick Hornby |