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a0cb19c
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But there was an important and essential truth contained in the idea, and the truth was that these things matter, and it's no good pretending that any relationship has a future if your record collections disagree violently, or if your favorite films wouldn't even speak to each other if they met at a party.
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music
love
nick-hornby
records
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Nick Hornby |
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f04f5fe
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All I know is that you can get very little from a book that is making you weep with the effort of reading it. You won't remember it, and you'll learn nothing from it, and you'll be less likely to choose a book over Big Brother next time you have a choice.
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Nick Hornby |
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11ea948
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And it's not like you never do anything wrong ever, is it?' said Marcus. 'I mean...' He had to be careful here. He knew he couldn't say too much or even anything at all about the hospital stuff. 'I mean how come I got to know Will in the first place?' Because you threw a bloody great baguette at a duck's head and killed it, basically,' said Will.
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Nick Hornby |
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6795d72
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I've developed contours for his elbows and knees and bum, and nobody else quite fits into me in quite the same way
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Nick Hornby |
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0624918
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What you don't 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 exhchanging a word with him, let alone a ring and bodily fluids.
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Nick Hornby |
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a1f9214
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She was trying to say something else; she was trying to say that the inability to articulate what one feels in any satisfactory way is one of our enduring tragedies. It wouldn't have been much, and it wouldn't have been useful, but it would have been something that reflected the gravity and the sadness inside her. Instead, she had snapped at him for being a loser. It was as if she were trying to find a handhold on the boulder of her feeling..
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Nick Hornby |
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13b6f46
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So this is supposed to be about the how, and when, and why, and what of reading -- about the way that, when reading is going well, one book leads to another and to another, a paper trail of theme and meaning; and how, when it's going badly, when books don't stick or take, when your mood and the mood of the book are fighting like cats, you'd rather do anything but attempt the next paragraph, or reread the last one for the tenth time.
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Nick Hornby |
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973e763
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This is the second Simply Red song on this tape. One's unforgivable. Two's a war crime. Can I fast-forward?
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Nick Hornby |
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cc22386
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You're seeing someone else, aren't you?" Seeing someone else? How on earth could that explain any of this? Why would seeing someone else necessitate bringing home a middle-aged woman, a teenaged punk and an American with a leather jacket and a Rod Stewart haircut? What would the story have been? But then, after reflection, I realised that Penny had probably been here before, and therefore knew that infidelity can usually provide the answer..
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live
humor
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Nick Hornby |
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14a28d1
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We can't go on apologizing all our lives, you know.
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Nick Hornby |
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3e70379
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You run the risk of losing anyone who is worth spending time with, unless you are so paranoid about loss that you choose someone unlosable, somebody who could not possibly appeal to anybody else at all.
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Nick Hornby |
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5814a70
|
It was hopeless, life, really. It was set up all wrong.
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Nick Hornby |
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3ee74cc
|
He had never once felt itchy, in the way that two connecting pieces of a jigsaw never felt itchy, as far as one could tell. If one were to imagine, for the sake of argument, that jigsaw pieces had thoughts and feelings, then it was possible to imagine them saying to themselves, 'I'm going to stay here. Where else would I go?' And if another jigsaw piece came along, offering its tabs and blanks enticingly in an attempt to lure one of the pie..
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Nick Hornby |
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b2e1472
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Clockers" asks--almost in passing, and there's a lot more to it than this--a pretty interesting question: if you choose to work for the minimum wage when everyone around you is pocketing thousands from drug deals, then what does that do to you, to your head and to your heart? (Hornby's thoughts after reading "Clockers" by Richard Price)"
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minimum-wage
working
drugs
psychology
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Nick Hornby |
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d88c321
|
I'd thought I'd live with my wife, but I couldn't find one.
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Nick Hornby |
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340fbe3
|
contemporary poetry is a kind of Reykjavik, a place where accessibility and intelligence have been fighting a Cold War by proxy for the last half-century.
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poetry
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Nick Hornby |
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9eb3367
|
What came first, the music or the misery? Did I listen to music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to music?
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Nick Hornby |
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b2b73f8
|
Complaining about boring football is a little like complaining about the sad ending of King Lear: it misses the point somehow.
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soccer
results
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Nick Hornby |
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e80adde
|
You can find people. It's like those acrobatic displays.... Those ones when you stand on top of loads of people in a pyramid. It doesn't really matter who they are, as long as they're there and you don't let them go away without finding someone else.
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Nick Hornby |
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240a4d8
|
What came first, the music or the misery? Did I listen to music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to music? Do all those records turn you into a melancholy person? 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 h..
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music
love
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Nick Hornby |
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9eb5d00
|
Not for the first time in my life, and certainly not for the last, a self-righteous gloom had edged out all semblance of logic.
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Nick Hornby |
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f1598e2
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Life isn't, and has never been, a 2-0 home victory after a fish and chip lunch.
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Nick Hornby |
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d689fad
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People go on about the first time being important, but it's the second time that really matters. Or the second person, anyway.
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Nick Hornby |
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d789828
|
Several months later, and I have finally read one of the three (books), even though I wanted to read all three of them immediately. What happened in between? Other books, is what happened. Other books, other moods, other obligations, other appetites, other reading journeys.
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Nick Hornby |
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2723bd8
|
In Bruce Springsteen songs, you can either stay and rot, or you can escape and burn.
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Nick Hornby |
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b77dea1
|
What good were real feelings anyway?
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feelings
nick-hornby
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Nick Hornby |
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2776f24
|
The artistic temperament is particularly unhelpful if it is just that, with no end product.
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Nick Hornby |
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c33b1c2
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I spent hours putting that cassette together. To me, making a tape is like writing a letter - there's a lot of erasing and rethinking and starting again, and I wanted it to be a good one. . . A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do. You've got to kick off with a corker, to hold the attention, and then you've got to up it a notch, or cool it a notch. . . oh, there are loads of rules. (pg. 88-9)
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Nick Hornby |
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606ad6e
|
You know the worst thing about being rejected? The lack of control. If I 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.
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Nick Hornby |
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4e27c8d
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The difference between these people and me is that they finished college and I didn't; as a consequence, they have smart jobs and I have a scruffy job, they are rich and I am poor, they are self confident and I am incontinent... they have opinions and I have lists.
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Nick Hornby |
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19a21ba
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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 te highest score on the Stargazer machine in the kebab shop on Hornsey Road--nothing. He's 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 the..
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Nick Hornby |
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05a3dd2
|
Will wrestled with his conscience, grappled it to the ground and sat on it until he couldn't hear a squeak out of it.
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people
life
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Nick Hornby |
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aa27e1a
|
It is a strange paradox that while the grief of football fans(and it is real grief) is private - we each have an individual relationship with our clubs, and I think that we are secretly convinced that none of the other fans understands quite why we have been harder hit than anyone else - we are forced to mourn in public, surrounded by people whose hurt is expressed in forms different from our own.
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fever-pitch
football-fan
nick-hornby
football
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Nick Hornby |
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67aa23e
|
Laura says - Everybody's faith needs testing from time to time, I thought it would be amusing to introduce you to someone with a Tina Turner album, and see whether you still felt the same. Rob reflects - ...tonight, I have to confess (but only to myself) that maybe, given the right set of peculiar, freakish, probably unrepeatable circumstances, it's not what you like but what you're like that's important.
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Nick Hornby |
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7412ae5
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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 be something. It's our inalienable right, as citizens of the twenty-first century. If Christina Aguilera or Britney or some American Idol jerk can be something, then why can't I? Where's mine, huh?
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Nick Hornby |
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80ed9b5
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We're here for such a short amount of time. Why do we spend any of it building sandcastles?
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Nick Hornby |
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7db2fa1
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The cliche had it that kids were the future, but that wasn't it: they were the unreflective, active present. They were not themselves nostalgic, because they couldn't be, and they retarded nostalgia in their parents. Even as they were getting sick and being bullied and becoming addicted to heroin and getting pregnant, they were in the moment, and she wanted to be in it with them. She wanted to worry herself sick about schools and bullying a..
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Nick Hornby |
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46ce6e4
|
Linda seemed to recognize loneliness. Possibly she could see it sitting opposite her, sipping lager and trying not to lose its temper. It was an illness, loneliness--it made you weak, gullible, feebleminded.
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Nick Hornby |
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54bfdf1
|
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. Perhaps it was these desperate, bitter men in the West Stand at Arsenal who taught me how to get angry in this way; and perhaps it is why I earn some of my living as a critic - maybe it's those vo..
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Nick Hornby |
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83c1dd8
|
He would read up on parenting, if he thought it would help, but his errors always seemed too basic for the manuals. "Always tell your kids they have siblings..." He couldn't imagine any child-raising guru taking the trouble to write that down. Maybe there was a gap in the market."
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Nick Hornby |
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4de8400
|
I loved them, and would always love them. But there was no place where they could fit anymore, so I had nowhere to put all the things I felt. I didn't know what to do with them, and they didn't know what to do with me, and isn't that just like life?
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Nick Hornby |
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ac023f9
|
And we'd had this stupid scene on the street, and even that was kind of cool, because 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.
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Nick Hornby |
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535605e
|
No time spent with a book is ever entirely wasted, even if the experience is not a happy one: there's always something to be learned. It's just that, every now and again, you hit a patch of reading that makes you feel as if you're pootling about... But what can you do about it? We don't choose to waste our reading time; it just happens. The books let us down.
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Nick Hornby |
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99db77b
|
I want to be a well-rounded human being with none of these knotty lumps of rage and guilt and self-disgust.
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Nick Hornby |