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9ffa811
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But what else can we do when we're so weak? We invest hours each day, months each year, years each lifetime in something over which we have no control; it is any wonder then, that we are reduced to creating ingenious but bizarre liturgies designed to give us the illusion that we are powerful after all, just as every other primitive community has done when faced with a deep and apparently impenetrable mystery?
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Nick Hornby |
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7fd2f96
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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.
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Nick Hornby |
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9bf3cb6
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And I don't know what difference it made, this sudden flash. It wasn't like I wanted to, you know, grab life in a passionate embrace and vow never to let it go until it let go of me. In a way, it makes things worse, not better. Once you stop pretending that everything's shitty and you can't wait to get out of it, which is the story I'd been telling myself for a while, then it gets more painful, not less. Telling yourself life is shit is lik..
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Nick Hornby |
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a8a75fe
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Asking the head I have now to explain its own thinking is as pointless as dialing your own telephone number on your own telephone: Either way, you get an engaged signal. Or your own answer message, if you have that kind of phone system.
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Nick Hornby |
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e2064b4
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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.
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Nick Hornby |
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0e629ea
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What did I think I was doing? What did she think she was doing? When I want to kiss people in that way now, with mouths and tongues and all that, it's because I want other things too: sex, Friday nights at the cinema, company and conversation, fused networks of family and friends, Lemsips brought to me in bed when I am ill, a new pair of ears for my records and CDs, maybe a little boy called Jack and a little girl called Holly or Maisie, I ..
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young-love
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Nick Hornby |
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910bae8
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I had to nurture those doubts as if they were tiny, sickly kittens, until eventually they became sturdy, healthy grievances, with their own cat doors, which allowed them to wander in and out of our conversation at will.
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Nick Hornby |
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9d10a9b
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I'm simply pointing out that what happens to us isn't the whole story. That I continue to exist even when we're not together.
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Nick Hornby |
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27a2303
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What harm has he ever done to you?' 'You know what harm he's done me. He offended me with his terrible taste.
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Nick Hornby |
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be2eed1
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Women who disapprove of men - and there's plenty to disapprove of - should remember how we started out, and how far we had to travel.
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women
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Nick Hornby |
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ac78e4e
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You're not allowed to say anything about books because they're books, and books are, you know, God.
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Nick Hornby |
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0aba99d
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See, records have helped me to fall in love, no question. I hear something new, with a chord change that melts my guts, and before I know it I'm looking for someone, and before I know it I've found her.
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Nick Hornby |
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b93f388
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The best customers are the ones who just have to buy a record on a Saturday, even if there's nothing they really want; unless they go home clutching a flat, square carrier bag, they feel uncomfortable. You can spot the vinyl addicts because after a while they get fed up with the rack they are flicking through, march over to a completely different section of the shop, pull a sleeve out from the middle somewhere, and come over to the counter;..
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Nick Hornby |
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33a153e
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If you haven't heard him...man, it's like he boiled down down all the melancholy in the world, all the bruises and all the fucked-up dreams you've let go, and poured the essence into a little tiny bottle and corked it up.
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Nick Hornby |
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d2a3b09
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That was his mother. When she wasn't crying over the breakfast cereal, she was laughing about killing herself.
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irony
people
life
mothers
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Nick Hornby |
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f765d88
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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.
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people
love
nick-hornby
lucky
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Nick Hornby |
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6aa321e
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Definitely avoid going out with ugly girls who say they want to be models. Not because they're ugly, but because they're mad"."
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Nick Hornby |
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e6a5963
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You just have to smile and take it, otherwise it would drive you mad.
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Nick Hornby |
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37a9a05
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He has the personality of a child prodigy, but no discernable talent.
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Nick Hornby |
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b53cfb3
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But all three of them had had to lose things in order to gain other things. Will had lost his shell and his cool and his distance, and he felt scared and vulnerable, but he got to be with Rachel; and Fiona had lost a big chunk of Marcus, and she got to stay away from the casualty ward; and Marcus had lost himself, and got to walk home from school with his shoes on.
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Nick Hornby |
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5566adc
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We have one of those conversations where every thing clicks, meshes, corresponds, locks, where even our pauses, even our punctuation marks, seem to be nodding in agreement.
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Nick Hornby |
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c0e7fbc
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His way of coping with the days was to think of activities as units of time, each unit consisting of about thirty minutes. Whole hours, he found, were more intimidating, and most things one could do in a day took half an hour. Reading the paper, having a bath, tidying the flat, watching Home and Away and Countdown, doing a quick crossword on the toilet, eating breakfast and lunch, going to the local shops... That was nine units of a twenty-..
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Nick Hornby |
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15f7b37
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about organizing books in his home library, and putting a book in the "Arts and Lit non-fiction section) I personally find that for domestic purposes, the Trivial Pursuit system works better than Dewey." --
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libraries
home
organization
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Nick Hornby |
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5116e45
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Yes, yes, I know all the jokes. What else could I have expected at Highbury? But I went to Chelsea and to Tottenham and to Rangers, and saw the same thing: that the natural state of a football fan is bitter disappointment, no matter what the score.
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sport
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Nick Hornby |
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42af075
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He was now beginning to wonder whether the jigsaw was the correct metaphor for relationships between me and women after all. It didn't take account of the sheer stubbornness of human beings, their determination to affix themselves to another even if they didn't fit. They didn't care about jutting off at weird angles, and they didn't care about phone booths and Mary, Queen of Scots. They were motivated not by seamless and sensible matching, ..
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Nick Hornby |
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9d43544
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Absurdly, I haven't yet got around to saying that football is a wonderful sport, but of course it is. Goals have a rarity value that points and runs and sets do not, and so there will always be that thrill, the thrill of seeing someone do something that can only be done three or four times in a whole game if you are lucky, not at all if you are not. And I love the pace of it, its lack of formula; and I love the way that small men can destro..
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Nick Hornby |
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383159d
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Jess thought for a moment. 'You know those films where people fight up the top of the Empire State Building or up a mountain or whatever? And there's always that bit when the baddie slips off and the hero tries to save him, but, like, the sleeve of this jacket tears off and goes over and you hear him all the way down. Aaaaaaaaagh. That's what I want to do.' 'You want to watch me plunge to my doom.' 'I'd like to know that I've made the..
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friendship
hornby
effort
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Nick Hornby |
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f7712fe
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Well, I'd like my life to be like a Bruce Springsteen song.
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music
life
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Nick Hornby |
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4eb5c4f
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I'm never going to complain about receiving free early copies of books, because clearly there's nothing to complain about, but it does introduce a rogue element into one's otherwise carefully plotted reading schedule. ... 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/Wo..
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reading
freebies
reading-lists
president
planning
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Nick Hornby |
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b3c5578
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Knowing that you want to die makes you less scared.
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Nick Hornby |
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8f39c63
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You spend Christmas at somebody's house, you worry about their operations, you give them hugs and kisses and flowers, you see them in their dressing gown...and then bang, that's it. Gone forever. And sooner or later there will be another mum, another Christmas, more varicose veins. They're all the same. Only the addresses, and the colors of the dressing gown, change.
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Nick Hornby |
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b8fd2b2
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when she removed my hand from her chest for the one hundred thousandth time. Attack and defense, invasion and repulsion... it was as if breasts were little pieces of property that had been unlawfully annexed by the opposite sex - they were rightfully ours and we wanted them back.
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teenagers
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Nick Hornby |
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e0c38ed
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I had wanted to kill myself, not because I hated living, but because I loved it. And the truth of the matter is, I think that a lot of people who think about killing themselves feel the same way. They love live but it's all fucked up for them We were up on that roof because we couldn't find a way back into life, and being shut out of it like that...It just fucking destroys you, man.
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Nick Hornby |
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cc83f7d
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I don't think you can call it stalking when it's just phone calls and letters and emails and knocking on the door.
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Nick Hornby |
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2c738e7
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I'm not the smartest guy in the world, but I'm certainly not the dumbest. I mean, I've read books like "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" and "Love in the Time of Cholera", and I think I've understood them. They're about girls, right? Just kidding. But I have to say my all-time favorite book is Johnny Cash's autobiography "Cash" by Johnny Cash."
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Nick Hornby |
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564ace6
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He loved Nirvana, but at his age they were kind of a guilty pleasure. All that rage and pain and self-hatred! Will got a bit...fed up sometimes, but he couldn't pretend it was anything stronger than that. So now he used loud angry rock music as a replacement for real feelings, rather than as an expression of them, and he didn't even mind very much. What good were real feelings anyway?
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Nick Hornby |
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1411517
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We are never allowed to forget that some books are badly written; we should remember that sometimes they're badly read, too.
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reading
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Nick Hornby |
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ec75085
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I burst into tears and I cry and cry until it feels as though it is not salt and water being squeezed from my eyes, but blood.
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Nick Hornby |
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5cd6c03
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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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d3bfc77
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For the first time, but certainly not the last, I began to believe that Arsenal's moods and fortunes somehow reflected my own
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Nick Hornby |
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a8cbfdf
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The annoying thing about reading is that you can never get the job done. The other day I was in a bookstore flicking through a book called something like (and, without naming names, you should be aware that the task set by the title is by definition impossible, because at least four hundred of the books suggested would kill you anyway), but reading begets reading--that's sort of the point of it, surely?--and anybody who never deviates fro..
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Nick Hornby |
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af2bcab
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She stopped typing. If she'd been using pen and paper, she would have screwed the paper up in disgust, but there wasn't a satisfying equivalent with email, seeing as everything was designed to stop you making a mistake. She needed a fuck-it key, something that made a satisfying ka-boom noise when you thumped it.
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Nick Hornby |
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bc759f2
|
But sometimes, very occasionally, songs and books and films and pictures express who you are perfectly. And they don't do this in words or images, necessarily; the connection is a lot less direct and more complicated than that. When I was first beginning to write seriously, I read Anne Tyler's Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, and suddenly knew what I was, and what I wanted to be, for better or worse. It's a process something like falling ..
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Nick Hornby |
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9d9e38d
|
But sometimes, very occasionally, songs and books and films and pictures express who you are perfectly. And they don't do this in words or images, necessarily; the connection is a lot less direct and more complicated than that. When I was first beginning to write seriously, I read Anne Tyler's Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, and suddenly knew what I was, and what I wanted to be, for better or worse. It's a process something like falling ..
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Nick Hornby |