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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 9c51401 | easily the best thing in her life at the moment was her secret. | Nick Hornby | ||
| cea4c4d | There was an awful lot to be said for familiarity, if you thought about it. It was an extremely underrated virtue, ignorable until the very moment that you were in danger of losing whatever or whoever it was that was familiar--a house, a view, a partner. | the-familiar | Nick Hornby | |
| acd4feb | 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? | misery music | Nick Hornby | |
| cd0a7e4 | Actually, I can see one advantage to the Western way of thinking, which is that if someone has a name, you know what to call them, don't you? It's only one small advantage, and there are millions of big disadvantages, including the biggest one of all, which is that names are really fascist and don't allow us to express ourselves as human beings, and turn us into one thing. | Nick Hornby | ||
| 1c94f67 | You have potential. I'm here to bring that out." "Potential as what?" "As a human being. You have all the basic ingredients. You're really likable, when you put your mind to it. You make people laugh, when you can be bothered, and you're kind, and when you decide you like someone then that person feels as though she's the center of the whole world, and that's a very sexy feeling. It's just that most of the time you can't be bothered." | Nick Hornby | ||
| 5e65b45 | There are many ways in which songs differ from books, but both songwriters and novelists are looking for material that will somehow mean something beyond itself, something that contains echoes and ironies and texture and complication. something both timely and timeless | music novelists | Nick Hornby | |
| b093e8f | She had to defend him in order to defend herself. That was why people were so prickly about their partners, even their ex-partners. To admit that Duncan wasn't up to much was to own up publicly to the terrible waste of time, and terrible lapses in judgment and taste. She had stuck up for Spandau Ballet in just the same way at school, even after she had stopped liking them. | poor-judgment rationalizations self-justification wasted-time | Nick Hornby | |
| 44760f4 | And you probably also know that when you look out of an aeroplane window and see the world shrink like that, you can't help but think about the whole of your life, from the beginning until where you are now, and everyone you've ever known. And you'll know that thinking about those things makes you feel grateful to God for providing them, and angry with Him for not helping you to understand them better, and so you end up in a terrible muddle.. | Nick Hornby | ||
| 17a2d87 | I'll have got him out of my system." "I hope not." "Really?" "What would there be left of you, if you did?" | Nick Hornby | ||
| 12ebb74 | All sorts of pieces of music are constantly being described as 'sexy', but that doesn't necessarily mean that you'd want them to accompany lovemaking. Most of them, in fact, are sexual substitutes, rather than sexual accompaniments - music for people who aren't getting any (or won't be until they get home) rather than people who are. | Nick Hornby | ||
| c15120a | One of the problems, it seems to me, is that we have got it into our heads that books should be hard work, and that unless they're hard work, they're not doing us any good. | Nick Hornby | ||
| 9e8a73e | How could there be a bad song called 'Iron Man', or 'War Pigs', or - my cup ranneth over - 'Rat Salad'? | Nick Hornby | ||
| d4a9200 | We all spend so much time not saying what we want, because we know we can't have it. And because it sounds ungracious, or ungrateful, or disloyal, or childish, or banal. Or because we're so desperate to pretend that things are OK, really, that confessing to ourselves they're not looks like a bad move. Go on, say what you want. ... Whatever it is, say it to yourself. The truth will set you free. Either that or it'll get you a punch in the no.. | Nick Hornby | ||
| 16ed031 | 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 e-mail, 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. | Nick Hornby | ||
| 28fe607 | They were all waiting for a man. Men were going to scoop them up in a net and take them home and put them into an even smaller tank. Not all of them were waiting to find a man, because some of them had already found one, but it didn't stop the waiting. A few were waiting for a man to make up his mind and fewer still, the lucky ones, were waiting for a man who'd already made up his mind to make enough money. Barbara | Nick Hornby | ||
| 7ea9129 | Musicians had been assholes since the day the lute was invented, | Nick Hornby | ||
| a7d35e4 | I am cowed--by her intelligence, and her ferocity, and the way she's always right. Or at least, she's always right enough to shut me up. 5. | Nick Hornby | ||
| a4b9843 | those places are reserved for the kind of humiliations are heartbreaks that you're just not capable of delivering. That probably sounds crueler than it is meant to, but the fact is that we're too old to make each other miserable, and that's a good thing, not a bad thing... | Nick Hornby | ||
| 0b287a5 | When you're as ill-read as I am, routinely ignoring the literature of the entire non-English-speaking world seems like a minor infraction. | Nick Hornby | ||
| a9ef44d | Songs are what I listen to, almost to the exclusion of everything else. I don't listen to classical music or jazz very often, and when people ask me what music I like, I find it very difficult to reply, because they usually want names of people, and I can only give them song titles. And mostly all I have to say about these songs is that I love them, and want to sing along to them, and force other people to listen to them, and get cross when.. | Nick Hornby | ||
| 95b9a69 | She regretted the explanation immediately, but that was because she always regretted everything | Nick Hornby | ||
| c3dc608 | By the light of a candle, he composed a letter, saying everything as briefly as possible: | Philip Pullman | ||
| 0c7af34 | Whenever you turn your head, your deaths dodge behind you. Wherever you look, they hide. They hide in a teacup. Or in a dewdrop. Or in a breath of wind. | his-dark-materials philip-pullman the-amber-spyglass | Philip Pullman | |
| d4cae09 | Labour without joy is base. Labour without sorrow is base. Sorrow without labour is base. Joy without labour is base. * JOHN RUSKIN | Philip Pullman | ||
| 33f3934 | I thought physics could be done to the glory of God, till I saw there wasn't any God at all | Philip Pullman | ||
| cba03b5 | Around them there was nothing but silence, as if all the world were holding its breath. | love silence spyglass theamberspyglass | Philip Pullman | |
| 12440e9 | The powers of this world are very strong. Men and women are moved by tides much fiercer than you can imagine, and they sweep us all up into the current. | Philip Pullman | ||
| 6687359 | As Mary said that, Lyra felt something strange happen to her body. She found a stirring at the roots of her hair: she found herself breathing faster. She had never been on a roller-coaster, or anything like one, but if she had, she would have recognised the sensations in her breast: they were exciting and frightening at the same time, and she had not the slightest idea why. The sensation continued, and deepened, and changed, as more parts o.. | Philip Pullman | ||
| 596f900 | And at half past nine in the evening at that restaurant table in Portugal," Mary continued, "someone gave me a piece of marzipan and it all came back. And I thought: am I really going to spend the rest of my life without ever feeling that again? I thought: I want to go to China. It's full of treasures and strangeness and mystery and joy. I thought, Will anyone be better off if I go straight back to the hotel and say my prayers and confess t.. | mary-malone | Philip Pullman | |
| cd397ff | mr. makepeace, do you really turn lead into gold?" "no, of course not. no one can do that. but if people think you're foolish enough to try, they don't bother to look at what you're really doing. they leave you in peace." | Philip Pullman | ||
| f474361 | So they had language, and they had fire, and they had society. And about then she found an adjustment being made in her mind, as the word creatures became the word people. These beings weren't human, but they were people, she told herself; it's not them, they're us. They | Philip Pullman | ||
| 216e5c2 | Maybe so," he said, "but whatever little chance of safety there is, I want her to have it." | Philip Pullman | ||
| 447e4b9 | We'll find a way. There is a way. We just don't know it yet. Don't stop.... | Philip Pullman | ||
| 463f1f5 | Darling, no one would ever dream of performing an operation on a child without testing it first. And no one in a thousand years would take a child's daemon away altogether! All that happens is a little cut, and then everything's peaceful. Forever! You see, your daemon's a wonderful friend and com panion when you're young, but at the age we call puberty, the age you're coming to very soon, darling, daemons bring all sort of troublesome thoug.. | daemon dust grief loneliness miss-coulter sadness | Philip Pullman | |
| d5f3537 | Rooks were cawing somewhere, and bells were ringing, and from the oxpens the steady beat of a gas engine announced the ascent of the evening Royal Mail zeppelin for London. | Philip Pullman | ||
| 60617ff | Everyone's daemon instantly became warlike: each child was accompanied by fangs, or claws, or bristling fur, and Pantalaimon, contemptuous of the limited imaginations of these gyptian demons, became a dragon the size of a deer-hound. | Philip Pullman | ||
| a10dbc1 | this is a different kind of knowing.... It's like understanding, I suppose.... | Philip Pullman | ||
| b00b284 | Maybe art itself was a kind of voodoo, possessing you, giving you supernatural power, letting you see in the dark. | Philip Pullman | ||
| 9256f59 | the particular plant longed for by the wife, which was originally parsley, was a well-known abortifacient. | Philip Pullman | ||
| a753f3e | You are an enemy of the Church, Lee Scoresby. By their fruits shall ye know them. | Philip Pullman | ||
| 62abc34 | Everything means something," Lyra said severely. "We just have to find out how to read it." | semiotics | Philip Pullman | |
| 989692e | There is time, and there is what is beyond time. There is darkness, and there is light. There is the world and the flesh, and there is God. | Philip Pullman | ||
| 5520bfc | men pass in front of our eyes like butterflies, creatures of a brief season. We love them; they are brave, proud, beautiful, clever; and they die almost at once. They die so soon that our hearts are continually racked with pain. | Philip Pullman | ||
| 17f9aca | The Authority considers that conscious beings of every kind have become dangerously independent, so Metatron is going to intervene much more actively in human affairs. | Philip Pullman |