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3e33b89
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This time, something different happens, though. It's the daydreaming that does it. I'm doing the usual thing--imagining in tiny detail the entire course of the relationship, from first kiss, to bed, to moving in together, to getting married (in the past I have even organized the track listing of the party tapes), to how pretty she'll look when she's pregnant, to names of children--until suddenly I realize that there's nothing left to actual..
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relationships
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Nick Hornby |
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9e40e9d
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These things are going to eat away at me... I rewrite the script in my head until it's 100-proof poison, and none of it helps at all.
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Nick Hornby |
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f3f98b3
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One can only presume that people who say that their favorite record of all time reminds them of their honeymoon in Corsica, or of their family Chihuahua, don't actually like music very much.
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Nick Hornby |
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e7f472d
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It is important that we are occasionally, perhaps even frequently, depressed by books, challenged by films, shocked by paintings, maybe even disturbed by music. But do they have to do all these things all the time? Can't we let them console, uplift, inspire, move, cheer?
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Nick Hornby |
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06472d5
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But I didn't know where I wanted to go. Or what I wanted to do when I got there. I had dreams, but they were vague things with no real substance. I wanted to be famous, or really rich, or wildly successful, but that was as far as the dream went. My whole life was a fill-in-the-blank.
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Nick Hornby |
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5b0694a
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he was home on his own and listening to the sort of music he needed to listen to when he felt like this, music that seemed to find the sore spot in him and press up hard against it...
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Nick Hornby |
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03e5e0a
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An ideal world in my own home... I'm not yet sure why the prospect appalls me quite so much, but I do know somewhere in me that (he) is wrong, that a life without hatred is no life at all, that my children should be allowed to despise whom they like. Now there's a right worth fighting for...
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Nick Hornby |
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d934431
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It was easy to be nice to an attractive woman over a dinner table. The despair came later, with children and tiredness and the sheer drudgery of marriage and monogamy.
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novelty
gossip
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Nick Hornby |
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2c4297f
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Dave and Serge...played the Fiddler's Elbow as if it were Giants Stadium, and even though it was acoustic, they just about blew the place up. They were standing on chairs adn lying on the floor, they were funny, they charmed everyone in the pub apart from an old drunk ditting next to the drum kit...who put his fingers firmly in his ears during Serge's extended harmonica solo. It was utterly bizarre and very moving: most musicians wouldn't h..
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reading
passion
music
live-band
performance
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Nick Hornby |
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da626df
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I could feel the weight of everything then --- the weight of loneliness, of everything that had gone wrong. I felt heroic, going up those last few flights to the top of the building, dragging that weight along with me. Jumping felt like the only way to get rid of it, the only way to make it work for me instead of against me; I felt so heavy that I knew I'd hit the street in no time. I'd beat the world record for falling off a tower block.
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Nick Hornby |
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50ff812
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This, for the benefit of those with only a sketchy grasp of football tactics, was a Dutch invention which necessitated flexibility from all the players on the pitch. Defenders were required to attack, attackers to play in mid-field; it was football's version of post-modernism, and the intellectuals loved it.
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Nick Hornby |
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6809317
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There was the same need for obscurity, the same suspicion that if a piece of music had reached a large number of people, it had somehow been drained of its worth.
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Nick Hornby |
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abceacf
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Did you know that Jacques Benveniste, one of the world's leading homeopathic "scientists," now claims that you can *email* homeopathic remedies? Yeah, see, what you do is you can take the "memory" of the diluted substance out of the water electromagnetically, put it on your computer, email it, and play it back on a sound card into new water. I mean, that could work, right? (Nick's thoughts after reading Francis Wheen's book "How Mumbo-Jumb..
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francis-wheen
homeopathy
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Nick Hornby |
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93e9883
|
Defeated misery is what all sport is about, eventually, if you follow the story for long enough; all sportsmen know this.
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sports
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Nick Hornby |
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df5a383
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I can live this life. I can. I can. It's a spark I want to cherish, a splutter of life in the flat battery; but just at the wrong moment I catch a glimpse at the night sky..., and I can see that there's nothing out there at all.
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Nick Hornby |
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c31706e
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We hate Simple Minds. They were no.1 in our Top Five Bands or Musicians who will have to be shot come the musical revolution (Michael Bolton, U2, Bryan Adams, and, surprise surprise, Genesis were tucked in behind them. Berry wanted to shoot The Beatles, but I pointed out that someone had already done it.
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simple-minds
the-beatles
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Nick Hornby |
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563b616
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I'm still not a very good white wine, but I'm drinkable - you could put me in a punch, anyway.
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Nick Hornby |
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3a3021d
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And she liked me. She liked . liked me. She
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Nick Hornby |
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c8dd942
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The annoying thing about reading is that you can never get the job done.
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Nick Hornby |
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c8a9b4f
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What was in it for me? I wasn't asking for any sort of reciprocation, after all. Why didn't she want her erogenous zones stimulated? I have no idea. All I know is that you could, if you wanted to, find the answers to all sorts of difficult questions buried in that terrible war-torn interregnum between the first pubic hair and the first soiled Trojan.
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teenagers
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Nick Hornby |
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06baa86
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In the old days, when he flew a lot, he'd never been able to get absorbed in a book until the plane had taken off, so he'd spent the pre-boarding time flicking through magazines and browsing in gift shops, and that's what the last couple of decades had felt like: one long flick through a magazine. If he'd known how long he was going to spend in the airport lounge of his own life, he'd have made different travel arrangements, but instead he'..
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Nick Hornby |
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bca2b83
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I don't have the heart to tell my sons that the older one gets, the less funny literature becomes--and they would refuse to believe me if I tried to explain that some people don't think jokes even belong in proper books. I won't bother breaking the news that, if they remain readers, they will insist on depressing themselves for about a decade of their lives, in a concerted search of gravitas through literature.
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Nick Hornby |
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927decd
|
Dialogue in the works of autobiography is quite naturally viewed with some suspicion. How on earth can the writer remember verbatim conversations that happened fifteen, twenty, fifty years ago? But 'Are you playing, Bob?' is one of only four sentences I have ever uttered to any Arsenal player (for the record the others are 'How's the leg, Bob?' to Bob Wilson, recovering from injury the following season; 'Can I have your autograph, please?' ..
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football
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Nick Hornby |
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e70d8bc
|
Songwriting is an art distinct from poetry.
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Nick Hornby |
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899b206
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When someone uses the phrase 'the prick one', and you know immediately that this is a synonym for the word 'metaphorically', you are entitled to wonder whether you know the speaker too well. You are even entitled to wonder whether you should know her at all.
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Nick Hornby |
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ceec4f3
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His father fell off a window-ledge. No wonder his mum had cheered up.
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Nick Hornby |
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9736039
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I'm thinking: am I supposed to fight, and what do I fight with, and whom am I fighting?
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nick hornby |
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3027c7c
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Iki haftami ulkenizi dolasarak gecirdim -ulkeniz, cilgin zamanlar mintikasi ve televizyonda surekli bir bicimde ereksiyon sorununu tedavi eden ilaclarin reklaminin yapildigi o ulkeyse eger- bu dergi icin bilgi toplamakla gorevlendirilmis olarak: kirk yedi edebiyatsever, sinir bozucu derecede sakin olmakla beraber yuzu gulmeyen genc adam ve kadindan olusan, her ay bu kosedeki tum iyi esprileri ayiklayan Hece Cumbusu, artik Amerikan okuma ali..
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din
ilişkiler
ingiltere
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Nick Hornby |
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3739708
|
Most days, for the last dozen or so years, I attributed to Charlie, or at least to our breakup, most things that have gone wrong for me. Like: I wouldn't have packed in college; I wouldn't have gone to work in Record and Tape; I wouldn't have had an unsatisfactory personal life. This is the woman who broke my heart, who ruined my life, this woman is single-handedly responsible for my poverty and directionlessness and failure, the woman I dr..
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Nick Hornby |
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ea35e9d
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Is the phrase "Deliciously politically incorrect" used with the same gay abandon in the U.S.? You come across it all the time here, and it usually means, quite simply, that a book or a movie or a TV program is racist and/or sexist and/or homophobic; there is a certain kind of cultural commentator who mysteriously associates these prejudices with a Golden Age during which we were allowed to do a lot of things that we are not allowed to do no..
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Nick Hornby |
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e797fce
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And what are we saying, anyway? That only old money is allowed to buy success? Isn't that a little like telling Noel and Liam Gallagher that they aren't allowed to make anything of themselves because they didn't go to Eton?
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Nick Hornby |
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f64142d
|
The trouble with influential books is that if you have absorbed the influence without ever reading the original, then it can sometimes be hard to appreciate the magnitude of its achievement.
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Nick Hornby |
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7f31af1
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Years later, Tony would discover that writers never felt they belonged anywhere. That was one of the reasons they became writers. It was strange, however, failing to belong even at a party full of outsiders.
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Nick Hornby |
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9bbfba5
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I see now that dismissing YA books because you're not a young adult is a little bit like refusing to watch thrillers on the ground that you're not a policeman or a dangerous criminal...The world suddenly seems a larger place.
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Nick Hornby |
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35c04cf
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You're my easy life option. The moment you stop being that, you're no option at all.
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Nick Hornby |
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e7850e5
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This, really, is the bottom line, the chief attraction of the opposite sex for all of us, old and young, men and women: we need someone to save us from the sympathetic smiles in the Sunday-night cinema queue, someone who can stop us from falling down into the pit where the permanently single live with their mums and dads. I'm not going back there again; I'd rather stay in for the rest of my life than attract that kind of attention.
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Nick Hornby |
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013ecd4
|
To me, making a tape is like writing a letter--there's a lot of erasing and rethinking
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Nick Hornby |
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1126297
|
I don't know why you'd want to have sex with me one nightand sleep on the sofa the next," she said. Well, of course,they weren't consecutive nights," he said."
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Nick Hornby |
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bd1d904
|
It's no good pretending that any relationship has a future if your record collections disagree violently or if your favourite films wouldn't even speak to each other if they met at a party.
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Nick Hornby |
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c3c8b30
|
I didn't say anything. But I could have pointed out that most life-changing says happen without your expecting them. I have spent what seems like half my life expecting the worst. And it never happens. But on the day it does, it will knock me flat on my back anyway.
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not-a-star
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Nick Hornby |
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59f8949
|
You don't know anything, apart from what you read in the paper." "You seem to be the only person in the world that the papers get bang to rights. If they say you've slept with a fifteen-year-old, you have. If they say you've fallen over drunk in the street, you have. They don't need to invent stuff for you." This was actually quite an acute observation. She was right: not once have I been the victim of misrepresentation or distortion. If ..
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Nick Hornby |
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91b954d
|
I'm equally sure, however, that I won't walk into a lamp-post while reading {literature}, like I did with {a legal thriller} all those years ago; you don't walk into lamp-posts when you're reading literary novels, do you?
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Nick Hornby |
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390be2b
|
When I'm arguing with St. Peter at the Pearly Gates, I'm going to tell him to ignore the Books Read column, and focus on the Books Bought instead. "This is *really* who I am," I'll tell him." --
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Nick Hornby |
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399828b
|
I am a rationalist, and I don't believe in genies, or sudden personality changes. I wanted David's anger to vanish only after years and years in therapy.
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Nick Hornby |