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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| ae77d86 | An official statement from Liverpool raised the spectre of a future where 'a club's rival can bring about a significant ban for a top player without anything beyond an accusation'. But on hearing this, many Manchester United fans would have been asking for a definition of the word 'rival'. | Nick Hornby | ||
| 3c2604e | Manchester City striker Mario Balotelli sets his own house on fire, apparently after letting off fireworks in his bathroom. Two days later City beat United 6-1, and after scoring the first goal Balotelli revealed a T-shirt bearing the question 'Why always me?' This was presumably intended to be rhetorical, but Cheshire Fire and Rescue service, who were at Balotelli's house until 2.45 a.m., could presumably have provided an answer. | Nick Hornby | ||
| f8abf84 | Thirty years on, things have changes to the extent that Wayne Rooney could comfortably afford to employ the best-paid banker in Britain full-time, if he could see any purpose or momentary amusement in doing so. | Nick Hornby | ||
| f3660fd | For us it is not comparable, the FA Cup and Champions League,' Arsene Wenger said before Arsenal played Leeds in the FA Cup. 'The Champions League is compulsory. The FA Cup is something that is for enjoyment ... The basis of our life at the top level is dictated by the championship. If we can add on top of that the FA Cup it is fantastic. | Nick Hornby | ||
| c17be1f | During the game, we find endless ways of saying that our team needs to score goals while at the same time not letting any in: 'We need a goal here,' 'We don't want to let one in now,' and so on. ('Here' and 'now' are the words intended to indicate a keen understanding of the complex nature of the particular game, but in truth they mean nothing. Teams always need to score, and never want to let one in.) | Nick Hornby | ||
| 928b6a7 | During the season, fans tend to observe, in as many complicated ways and with as much detail as we can come up with, only that a winning team is very good, and a losing team is hopeless. My mother or Prince Charles or probably a Martian could make the same observation, but their views would be discounted on the grounds of ignorance. | Nick Hornby | ||
| c13bc97 | We are, a lot of the time, baffled by the news we see on the front pages of our newspapers, often because the stories are complex, and we missed the beginning of them anyway. (How far back do we have to go to find the roots of the Euro crisis? To 2008? 1999, when the currency came into being? 1992? 1945?) That is one of the reasons why natural disasters and murders and cases involving missing children become so involving: we understand them.. | Nick Hornby | ||
| b91a133 | Even Tucker's way of not living could be described as living, if you had a crush on him.) | Nick Hornby | ||
| 75a90a8 | Manchester United would have retained the Premiership if they'd won this game - or, of course, if they'd won any of the other games they drew during the course of the season. Or, seeing as one extra point would have done the trick, if they'd drawn any of the games they lost, especially the two against Manchester City. Or, seeing as they lost the trophy on goal difference, if their victories had been achieved with a bigger winning margin. | Nick Hornby | ||
| da62a03 | It didn't help that I was never allowed to study anything remotely contemporary until the last year of university: there was never any sense of leading to . If anything, my education gave me the opposite impression, of an end to cultural history round about the time that Forster wrote . The quickest way to kill all love for the classics, I can see now, is to tell young people that nothing else maters, because then all they can do is loo.. | literature | Nick Hornby | |
| d69ee45 | I couldn't have written because I--and I'm not alone, by any means--do not have Carey's breadth of reading, nor his calm, wry logic, which enables him to demolish the arguments of just about everyone who has ever talked tosh about objective aesthetic principles. And this group, it turns out, includes anyone who has ever talked about objective aesthetic principles. | Nick Hornby | ||
| 0845b85 | Sitting at the table with the kids, and being told off like a kid, has liberated me; my disenfranchisement has empowered me. | Nick Hornby | ||
| 40a3161 | You may think that you don't want to read about the problems of being brought up Mennonite, but the great thing about books is that you'll read anything a good writer wants you to read. | writers | Nick Hornby | |
| 023938b | I've had countless conversations with or about people who are "sleeping in separate bedrooms", as if sleeping in the same bed is all there is to staying married, but however bad things get, sharing a bed has never been problematic; it's the rest of life that horrifies." | Nick Hornby | ||
| 53e2fed | writers never felt they belonged anywhere. That was one of the reasons they became writers. | Nick Hornby | ||
| 7d09b3f | Nobody should have children just because it made the photo library on the computer more interesting. | Nick Hornby | ||
| 4a185da | 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 hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss. 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 th.. | Nick Hornby | ||
| ba48dcc | There were only seven years between the first and last Beatles albums. That's nothing, seven years, when you think of how their hairstyles changed and their music changed. Some bands now go seven years without hardly bothering to do anything. | change hairstyles music seven-years the-beatles time | Nick Hornby | |
| 9a87062 | In the end I value literacy more highly than health; if our two countries were full of fat readers, rather than millions of Victoria Beckhams, then we would all be better off. | Nick Hornby | ||
| bae6b65 | Was everything an accident of geography? | Nick Hornby | ||
| 947af6f | don't think people with talent necessarily value it, because it all comes so easy to them, and we never value things that come easy to us. | Nick Hornby | ||
| 21eebfe | I'd hoped for someone who was remarkably intelligent, but disadvantaged by home circumstance, someone who only needed an hour's extra tuition a week to become some kind of working-class prodigy. I wanted my hour a week to make the difference between a future addicted to heroin and a future studying English at Oxford. That was the sort of kid I wanted, and instead they'd given me someone whose chief interest was in eating fruit. I mean, what.. | disadvantaged english fruit gents-toilets heroin intelligent learning-to-read martin-sharpe oxford pacino prodigy reading symbol telly tutoring | Nick Hornby | |
| 7fe0e33 | Being gay was a bit like the Olympics: It disappeared in ancient times, and then they brought it back in the twentieth century. | Nick Hornby | ||
| 89fb1f9 | A Tragic Honesty, like the Ian Hamilton biography of Lowell that I read recently, is a sad and occasionally terrifying account of how creativity can be simultaneously fragile and self-destructive; it also made me grateful that I am writing now, when the antidepressants are better, and we all drink less. Stories about contemporary writers being taken away in straitjackets are thin on the ground - or no one tells them to me, anyway - but it s.. | Nick Hornby | ||
| 5fba224 | In a few short weeks, mock-marital status had ceased to be something to aspire to, and had become a cause for scorn. At seventeen, we were becoming as embittered and as unromantic as our parents. | Nick Hornby | ||
| 602f138 | Is that thing actually going round? I can't tell | Nick Hornby | ||
| 66c95e6 | Bad thing upon bad thing upon bad thing until you can't take anymore, and then it's off to the nearest multistory car park in the family hatchback with a length of rubber tubing. Surely that's fair enough? Surely the coroner's report should read, "He took his own life after sober and careful contemplation of the fucking shambles it had become." | Nick Hornby | ||
| efbe479 | Most of this fixation was easy to explain. Brady was a midfield player, a passer, and Arsenal haven't really had one since he left. It might surprise those who have a rudimentary grasp of the rules of the game to learn that a First Division football team can try to play football without a player who can pass the ball, but it no longer surprises the rest of us: passing went out of fashion just after silk scarves and just before inflatable ba.. | Nick Hornby | ||
| c1ca916 | Look at the statistics. You're more likely to top yourself if you've just gone through a divorce. Or if you're anorexic. Or if you're unemployed. Or if you're a prostitute. Or if you've fought in a war, or if you've been raped, or if you've lost somebody . . . There are lots and lots of factors that push people over the edge; none of these factors are likely to make you feel anything but fucking miserable. | Nick Hornby | ||
| da40904 | He was a story at least, even if he never became anything else. | love relationships | Nick Hornby | |
| dd6da1e | I remember the juvenile stuff, where you put your arm along the sofa and let it drop onto her shoulder, or press your leg against hers; I remember the mock-tough adult stuff I used to try when I was in my mid-twenties, where I looked someone in the eye and asked if they wanted to stay the night. But none of that seems appropriate anymore. What do you do when you're old enough to know better? | Nick Hornby | ||
| 961ae05 | sentimental music has this great way of taking you back somewhere at the same time that it takes you forward, so you feel nostalgic and hopeful at the same time. | Nick Hornby | ||
| 0ca1eab | 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, | Nick Hornby | ||
| d6d60e6 | I have made myself more complicated than I really am. | Nick Hornby | ||
| 215e539 | Surely we all occasionally buy books because of a daydream we're having--a little fantasy about the people we might turn into one day, when our lives are different, quieter, more introspective, and when all the urgent reading, whatever that might be, has been done. We never arrive at that point, needless to say.... | reading | Nick Hornby | |
| c195a05 | A couple of times a year I make myself a tape to play in the car, a tape full of all the new songs I've loved over the previous few months, and every time I finish one I can't believe that there'll be another one. Yet there always is, and I can't wait for the next one; you need only a few hundred more things like that, and you've got a life worth living. | Nick Hornby | ||
| 27c4148 | At around four o'clock most Saturday afternoons, just when I make us all a cup of tea, I have a little glow on, maybe because this is after all my work, and it's going OK, maybe because I'm proud of us, of the way that, though our talents are small and peculiar, we use them to their best advantage. | Nick Hornby | ||
| 5b7a13b | I hate calling him T-Bone. It sets my teeth on edge, like when you have to ask for a Big Heap Buffalo Billburger, when all you want is a quarter-pounder, or a Just Like Mom Used to Make, when all you want is a piece of apple pie. | Nick Hornby | ||
| dbcc8f6 | Eventually he begins to practice his new signature in the margins of the paper. He tries it in various styles, his hand unaccustomed to the angles of the N, the dotting of the two i's. He wonders how many times he has written his old name, at the top of how many tests and quizzes, how many homework assignments, how many yearbook inscriptions to friends. How many times does a person write his name in a lifetime - a million? Two million? | names the-namesake | Jhumpa Lahiri | |
| 3cd8b66 | The view induces the opposite of vertigo, a lurching feeling inspired not by gravity's pull to earth, but by the infinite reaches of heaven. | Jhumpa Lahiri | ||
| 4ae21b0 | In so many ways, his family's life feels like a string of accidents, unforeseen, unintended, one incident begetting another. | Jhumpa Lahiri | ||
| 6263e5c | It made him shy, they way he felt the first time they stood together in a mirror. | Jhumpa Lahiri | ||
| d72a45b | He has no ABCD friends at college. He avoids them, for they remind him too much of the way his parents choose to live, befriending people not so much because they like them, but because of a past they happen to share. | Jhumpa Lahiri | ||
| 4e17647 | Immersing herself in a third language, a third culture, had been her refuge--she approached French, unlike things American or Indian, without guilt, or misgiving, or expectation of any kind. It was easier to turn her back on the two countries that could claim her in favor of one that had no claim whatsoever. | immigration language | Jhumpa Lahiri |