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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| f1a37ca | I was just going to have a discreet "J R" done on my upper arm, but Victor the tattooist wasn't having any of it. "Which one is she? 'J' or 'R'?" "'J.'" "And how long have you been seeing this 'J' bird, then?" I was frightened by the aggressive masculinity of the parlor--the other customers (who were all firmly wrestling-team muscular, and seemed inexplicably amused to see me), the nude women on the walls, the lurid examples of services off.. | Nick Hornby | ||
| 6e69eb2 | So you weren't interested in the music at all?" "Well, yes. A bit. And more so then than I am now. That's life, though, isn't it?" "But you see...That's all there is of me. There isn't anything else. If you've lost interest in that, you've lost interest in everything. What's the point of us?" "You really believe that?" "Yes. Look at me. Look at the flat. What else has it got, apart from records and CDs and tapes?" "And do you like it that w.. | Nick Hornby | ||
| 22824fc | 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 this.. | Nick Hornby | ||
| 460e2dc | So what should I be doing?" "I don't know. Something. Working. Seeing people. Running a scout troop, or running a club even. Something more than waiting for life to change and keeping your options open. You'd keep your options open for the rest of your life, if you could. You'll be lying on your deathbed, dying of some smoking-related disease, and you'll be thinking, 'Well, at least I've kept my options open. At least I never ended up doing.. | Nick Hornby | ||
| c4e5f93 | When I am no longer desperate, when I have got all this sorted out, I promise you here and now that I will never ever complain again about how the shop is doing, or about the soullessness of modern pop music, or the stingy fillings you get in the sandwich bar up the road (PS1.60 for egg mayonnaise and crispy bacon, and none of us have ever had more than four pieces of crispy bacon in a whole round yet) or anything at all. I will beam beatif.. | Nick Hornby | ||
| 0f961a7 | You can see this everywhere you go: young, middle-class people whose lives are beginning to disappoint them making too much noise in restaurants and clubs and wine bars. "Look at me! I'm not as boring as you think I am! I know how to have fun!" Tragic. I'm glad I learned to stay home and sulk.)" | Nick Hornby | ||
| 7b5ee10 | I will always be grateful to her for creating in me the narcotic need to hear her song again and again. It is, after all, a harmless need, easily satisfied, and there are few enough of those in the world. | Nick Hornby | ||
| bea3b2b | It seems to me that if you place music (and books, probably, and films, and plays, and anything that makes you feel) at the center of your being, then you can't afford to sort out your love life, start to think of it as the finished product. You've got to pick at it, keep it alive and in turmoil, you've got to pick at it and unravel it until it all comes apart and you're compelled to start all over again. Maybe we all live life at too high .. | Nick Hornby | ||
| e386dcb | Wanting to kill myself is was an appropriate and reasonable response to a whole series of unfortunate events that had rendered life unlivable. Oh, yes, I know the shrinks would say that they could have helped, but that's half the trouble with this bloody country, isn't it? No one's willing to face their responsibilities. It's always someone else's fault. Boo hoo hoo. Well, I happen to be one of those rare individuals who believe that what w.. | Nick Hornby | ||
| 044345c | He was one of the first people to complain about the increasing encroachment of the state into personal lives, but, actually, shouldn't there be a little more encroachment, when it came to things like this? Where was the protective fence, or the safety net? They made it hard for you to jump off bridges, or to smoke, to own a gun, to become a gynecologist. So how come they let you walk out on a stable, functioning relationship? They shouldn'.. | Nick Hornby | ||
| f12d146 | The anger was clearly real, though. It was in there, sloshing around, looking for the nearest hole to escape through. | Nick Hornby | ||
| 09400ae | The moment had gone. You're probably thinking, How much concentration does a man need to throw himself off the top of a high building? Well, you'd be surprised. Before Maureen arrived I'd been in the zone; I was in a place where it would have been easy to push myself off. I was entirely focused on all the reasons I was up there in the first place; I understood with horrible clarity the impossibility of attempting to resume life down on the .. | Nick Hornby | ||
| db65bc3 | There is a paradox here, however, a paradox that provides some consolation: these feelings of guilt are harmful to one's mental health, yes, granted. But those who have no need to feel guilty are, in my experience, the most mentally unhealthy of all of us, because the only way to have a guilt-free relationship with one's parents is to talk to them and see them constantly, maybe even live with them. And that can't be good, can it? So if thos.. | Nick Hornby | ||
| e0e35b1 | I had discovered after the Swindon game that loyalty, at least in football terms, was not a moral choice like bravery or kindness; it was more like a wart or a hump, something you were stuck with. Marriages are nowhere near as rigid - you won't catch any Arsenal fans slipping off to Tottenham for a bit of extra-marital slap and tickle, and though divorce is a possibility (you can just stop going if things get too bad), getting hitched again.. | Nick Hornby | ||
| 5cd7734 | like being able to see how I got from Deep Purple to Howlin' Wolf in twenty-five moves; I am no longer pained by the memory of listening to "Sexual Healing" all the way through a period of enforced celibacy, or embarrassed by the reminder of forming a rock club at school, so that I and my fellow fifth-formers could get together and talk about Ziggy Stardust and Tommy." | Nick Hornby | ||
| a51ccac | He was thinking about Edith. She was constantly on the verge of canceling their marriage. She would only commission a few shows at a time, reluctantly, and if he had listened properly, she'd always been telling him that it would all end one day. | Nick Hornby | ||
| 971d946 | Take away the love and the laughter, narrate the stories as if the characters had acted with malice and self-absorption, and everybody was in a bleak independent film about alcoholism and schizophrenia and child abuse. | Nick Hornby | ||
| 1dfef61 | She thought she'd focus on the compliment, rather than the terrifying glimpse she'd been given into her flatmate's soul. She found herself particularly worried by Marjorie's willingness to do all that, the slicing and the bleeding and the murdering, for only a percentage of the advantages she envied. There was something in this compromise that made it seem more real than Barbara wanted it to be. | Nick Hornby | ||
| e5d104f | 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. | Nick Hornby | ||
| 801e4ab | After Sophie had scraped the last of the makeup off her face, she was aware of the first sharp pangs of something that felt like homesickness. They'd already been told that the BBC wanted another series, but that was months away; and anyway, the last episode of the first series made her realize that one day there would be a last episode, and she didn't know whether she'd be able to bear it. And it didn't help, telling herself that when it w.. | Nick Hornby | ||
| 6a2038e | I can see everything once it's already happened--I'm very good at the past. It's the present I can't understand. | Nick Hornby | ||
| 074c2c7 | Several months later, and I have finally read one of the three, 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.) | Nick Hornby | ||
| 2bc270e | It had only taken me six years to change from a ten-year-old to a sixteen-year-old; surely six years wasn't long enough for a transformation of that magnitude. | humor | Nick Hornby | |
| 64580d5 | The Beatles were bubblegum cards and Help at the Saturday morning cinema and toy plastic guitars and singing 'Yellow Submarine' at the top of my voice in the back row of the coach on school trips. They belong to me, not to me and Laura, or me and Charlie, or me and Alison Ashworth, and though they'll make me feel something, they won't make me feel anything bad. | music relationships the-beatles | Nick Hornby | |
| d1803af | We wrote about whatever we wanted, and we ended up with eighteen million people watching us. That's the thing about television comedy, isn't it? It makes us all a part of something. That's what I love about it. | Nick Hornby | ||
| 8b95a23 | And also, what kind of job was comic magician? She didn't think she could bear to be married to a comic magician, even if his breath were sweeter than Parma violets and his kisses were like atom bombs. Comic magicians belonged on seaside piers. Comic magicians were what she had come to London to escape, not to find, and certainly not to marry. | Nick Hornby | ||
| 7183eec | 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.. | Nick Hornby | ||
| fba775f | Que fue primero: la musica o la tristeza? ?Me dio por escuchar musica porque estaba triste? ?O es que estaba triste porque escuchaba musica? ?No te convierten todos esos discos en una persona de tendencia melancolica? Hay quien se preocupa, y mucho, de que los ninos pequenos jueguen con armas de fuego, de que los adolescentes vean videos en los que la violencia es moneda corriente; nos da miedo que esa esa especie de cultura de la violencia.. | Nick Hornby | ||
| a410fd8 | A critical faculty is a terrible thing. When I was eleven there were no bad films, just films I didn't want to see, there was no bad food, just Brussels sprouts and cabbage, and there were no bad books - everything I read was great. Then suddenly, I woke up in the morning and all that had changed. How could my sister not hear that David Cassidy was not in the same class as Black Sabbath? Why on EARTH would my English teacher think that 'The.. | Nick Hornby | ||
| 9d0f13d | Being a freak isn't the same thing as having a talent. | Nick Hornby | ||
| 259c97e | I'm the one who should apologize,' he said. 'I want to help, but I know I won't be able to. I haven't go the answers to anything.' 'That's what men think, isn't it?' 'What?' 'That unless you've got some answer, unless you can say, "Oh, I know this bloke in Essex Road who can fix that for you", then it's not worth bothering.' Will shifted in his seat and didn't say anything. That was precisely what he thought; in fact, he had spent half the .. | men-and-women | Nick Hornby | |
| 4700d2d | Maybe we all live life at too high a pitch, those of us who absorb emotional things all day, and as a consequence we can never feel merely content: we have to be unhappy, or ecstatically, head-over-heels happy, and those states are difficult to achieve within a stable, solid relationship. Maybe Al Green is directly responsible for more than I ever realized. | Nick Hornby | ||
| 74517bc | What you don't ever 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 changing a word with him, let alone a ring and bodily fluids. Nor is it possible to foresee the desperation and depression, that sense that your life is over, the occasional urge to hit your whining child, even though hitting them is something you knew for a fact you wou.. | Nick Hornby | ||
| 23e2a0a | a futballszurkolo termeszetes allapota a keseru csalodottsag, fuggetlenul az eredmenytol. | Nick Hornby | ||
| 6926089 | Is it so wrong, wanting to be at home with your record collection? It's not like collecting records is like collecting stamps, or beermats, or antique thimbles. There's a whole world in here, a nicer, dirtier, more violent, more peaceful, more colorful, sleazier, more dangerous, more loving world than the world I live in; there is history, and geography, and poetry, and countless other things I should have studied at school, including music.. | Nick Hornby | ||
| 3fa2dbe | You just...you just don't do anything. You get lost in your head, and you sit around thinking instead of getting on with something, and most of the time you think rubbish. You always seem to miss what's really happening. | Nick Hornby | ||
| f44f312 | That's what family stories were--amusing accounts of the messes and the fuckups. Take away the love and the laughter, narrate the stories as if the characters had acted with malice and self-absorption, and everybody was in a bleak independent film about alcoholism and schizophrenia and child abuse. | Nick Hornby | ||
| 91117c1 | Defanscilar her zaman forvetcilerden daha iyi analizcilerdir. | Nick Hornby | ||
| 50f6dac | bu kitap minimalist bir ressamla ilgili ve konu minimalist sanat oldugu zaman fark ettim ki ben agnostik hatta belki ateistim. Bu kelimeleri kullaniyorum cunku bence minimalizme ya inanirsiniz ya da inanmazsiniz -bir Hockney, bir Hopper ya da bir Monet soz konusu oldugunda size taninmayan bir sanstir bu. Karsimizda Irwin var (sans bu ya sevilesi, dusunceli bir adam) turuncu bir zemin uzerinde turlu duz cizgilerden ibaret olan en son desen c.. | minimalist-sanat | Nick Hornby | |
| 17932e8 | Nen sajnaltam se a csapatot, se a tobbi szurkolot, csakis magamat sajnaltam, es most mar tudom, hogy a futballbanat mindig ilyen. Amikor a csapatunk kikap a Wembleyben, a kollegainkra vagy az osztalytarsainkra gondolunk, akikkel hetfo reggel szembe kell neznunk, es az euforiara, amelytol az elet megfosztott bennunket, es ilyenkor megfogadjuk, hogy soha az eletben nem leszunk meg egyszer ilyen sebezhetok. | Nick Hornby | ||
| e43bc49 | My companions for the afternoon were affable, welcoming middle-aged men in their late thirties and early forties who simply had no conception of the import of the afternoon for the rest of us. To them it was an afternoon out, a fun thing to do on a Saturday afternoon; if I were to meet them again, they would, I think, be unable to recall the score that afternoon, or the scorer (at half-time they talked office politics), and in a way I envie.. | football | Nick Hornby | |
| be5d615 | Everyone knows the song that Millwall fans sing, to the tune of ,,Sailing": 'No one likes us/No one likes us/No one likes us/We don't care.' In fact I have always felt that the song is a little melodramatic, and that if anyone should sing it, it is Arsenal. Every Arsenal fan, the youngest and the oldest, is aware that no one likes us, and every day we hear that dislike reiterated." | football | Nick Hornby | |
| 778757e | 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 all at the same time. | Nick Hornby | ||
| b923f68 | Quasi tutta la gente ha una corda che la lega a qualcuno, e la corda puo essere corta, oppure lunga. E che tu non lo sai quanto e lunga. Non e tua la scelta. | Nick Hornby |