Browsing Quotes By Nick Hornby, page 2
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There’s a howl in front of us, a terrible, terrible noise that I don’t want to hear: I can only just tell that it’s Laura’s voice, but I know that it is, and at that moment I want to go to her and offer to become a different person, to remove all trace of what is me, as long as she will let me look after her and try to make her feel better.
When we get out into the light, people crowd around Laura and Jo and Janet, and hug them; I want to do the same, but I don’t see how I can. But Laura sees Liz and me hovering on the fringe of the group, and comes to us, and thanks us for coming, and holds us both for a long time, and when she lets go of me I feel that I don’t need to offer to become a different person: it has happened already.Speaker: Nick HornbyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 9:18 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
If I ever have another relationship, I’ll buy her, whoever she is, stuff that she ought to like but doesn’t know about; that’s what new boyfriends are for.…If I can’t buy specially priced compilation albums for new girlfriends, then I might as well give up, because I’m not sure that I know how to do anything else.
Speaker: Nick HornbyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 9:18 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
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 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.
Speaker: Nick HornbyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 9:17 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
I know the films she’s talking about, and they’re stupid. Those men don’t exist. Saying: I love you” is easy, a piece of piss, and more or less every man I know does it all the time. I’ve acted as though I haven’t been able to say it a couple of times, although I’m not sure why. Maybe because I wanted to lend the moment that sort of corny Doris Day romance, make it more memorable than it otherwise would have been. You know, you’re with someone, and you start so say something, and then you stop, and she goes “What?” and you go, “No, it’ll sound stupid,” and then she makes you spit it out, even though you’d been intending to say it all along, and she thinks it’s all the more valuable for being hard-won. Maybe she knew all the time that you were messing about, but she doesn’t mind, anyway. It’s like a quote: it’s the nearest any of us gets to being in the movies, those few days when you decide that you like somebody enough to tell her that you love her, and you don’t want to muck it up with a glob of dour, straightforward, no-nonsense sincerity.
Speaker: Nick HornbyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 9:16 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“That’s how it goes. We all do that.”
“You all write songs about each other?”
“No, but…”
It would take too long to explain about Marco and Charlie, and how they wrote Sarah, and how Sarah and her ex, the one who wanted to be someone at the BBC, how they wrote me, and how Rosie the pain-in-the-arse simultaneous orgasm girl and I wrote Ian. It’s just that none of us had the wit or the talent to make them into songs. We made them into life, which is much messier, and more time-consuming, and leaves nothing for anybody to whistle.Speaker: Nick HornbyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 9:13 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
I remember what it is I like about sex: what I like about sex is that I can lose myself in it entirely. Sex, in fact, is the most absorbing activity I have discovered in adulthood. When I was a child I used to feel this way about all sorts of things—Legos, The Jungle Book, The Hardy Boys, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Saturday morning cartoons… I could forget where I was, the time of day, who I was with. Sex is the only thing I’ve found like that as a grown-up, give or take the odd film: books are no longer like that once you’re out of your teens, and I’ve certainly never found it in my work. All the horrible pre-sex self-consciousness drains out of me, and I forget where I am, the time of day…and yes, I forget who I’m with, for the time being. Sex is about the only grown-up thing I know how to do; it’s weird, then, that it’s the only thing that can make me feel like a ten-year-old.
Speaker: Nick HornbyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 9:13 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Is there anything more adult than sticking with a relationship that’s falling apart in the hope that you can put it right? I’ve never done that in my life.
Speaker: Nick HornbyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 9:12 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
I never had any wild crush on her, and that used to worry me about the long-term future: I used to think—and given the way we ended up, maybe I still do—that all relationships need the kind of violent shove that a crush brings, just to get you started and to push you over the humps. And then, when the energy from that shove has gone and you come to something approaching a halt, you have a look around and see what you’ve got. It could be something completely different, it could be something roughly the same, but gentler and calmer, or it could be nothing at all.
With Laura, I changed my mind about that whole process for a while. There weren’t any sleepless nights or losses of appetite or agonizing waits for the phone to ring for either of us. But we just carried on regardless, anyway, and because there was no steam to lose, we never had to have that look around to see what we’d always had. She didn’t make me miserable, or anxious, or ill at ease, and when we went to bed I didn’t panic and let myself down, if you know what I mean, and I think you do.Speaker: Nick HornbyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 9:11 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
I can see that now. I can see everything once it’s already happened—I’m very good at the past. It’s the present I can’t understand.
Speaker: Nick HornbyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 9:10 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
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 a history, and geography, and poetry, and countless other things I should have studied at school, including music.
Speaker: Nick HornbyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 9:10 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
It’s brilliant, being depressed; you can behave as badly as you like.
Speaker: Nick HornbyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 9:09 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
It’s only just beginning to occur to me that it’s important to have something going on somewhere, at work or at home, otherwise you’re just clinging on. If I lived in Bosnia, then not having a girlfriend wouldn’t seem like the most important thing in the world, but here in Crouch End it does. You need as much ballast as possible to stop you from floating away; you need people around you, things going on, otherwise life is like some film where the money ran out, and there are no sets, or locations, or supporting actors, and it’s just one bloke on his own staring into the camera with nothing to do and nobody to speak to, and who’d believe in this character then? I’ve got to get more stuff, more clutter, more detail in here, because at the moment I’m in danger of falling off the edge.
Speaker: Nick HornbyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 9:09 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Sometimes it seems as though the only way a man can judge his own niceness, his own decency, is by looking at his relationships with women—or rather, with prospective or current sexual partners. It’s easy enough to be nice to your mates. You can buy them a drink, make them a tape, ring them up to see they’re OK… there are any number of quick and painless methods of turning yourself into a Good Bloke. When it comes to girlfriends, though, it’s much trickier to be consistently honorable. One moment you’re ticking along, cleaning the toilet bowl, and expressing your feelings and doing all the other things that a modern chap is supposed to do; the next, you’re manipulating and sulking and double-dealing and fibbing with the best of them. I can’t work it out.
Speaker: Nick HornbyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 9:08 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
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.
Speaker: Nick HornbyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 9:07 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
My genius, if I can call it that, is to combine a whole load of averageness into one compact frame. I’d say that there were millions like me, but there aren’t, really: lots of blokes have impeccable music taste but don’t read, lots of blokes read but are really fat, lots of blokes are sympathetic to feminism but have stupid beards, lots of blokes have a Woody Allen sense of humor but look like Woody Allen. Lots of blokes drink too much, lots of blokes behave stupidly when they drive cars, lots of blokes get into fights, or show off about money, or take drugs. I don’t do any of these things, really; if I do OK with women, it’s not because of the virtues I have, but because of the shadows I don’t have.
Speaker: Nick HornbyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 9:06 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
When you get yourself in that place, the place I was in on New Year’s Eve, you think people who aren’t up on the roof are a million miles away, all the way across the ocean, but they’re not. There is no ocean. Pretty much all of them are on dry land, in touching distance. I’m not trying to say that’s how close happiness is, if we could only see it, or some bullshit like that. I’m not telling you that suicidal people aren’t so far away from people who can get by; I’m telling you that people who get by aren’t so far away from being suicidal. Maybe I shouldn’t find that as comforting as I do.
Speaker: Nick HornbyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 9:05 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
It’s a currency like any other, self-worth. You spend year saving up, and you can blow it all in an evening if you so choose. I’d done forty-odd years’ worth in the space of a few months, and now I had to save up again.
Speaker: Nick HornbyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 9:04 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Quite clearly, I needed two heads, to heads being better than one and all that. One would have to be the old one, just because the old one knows people’s names and phone numbers, and which breakfast cereal I prefer, and so on; the second one would be able to observe and interpret the behavior of the first, in the manner of a television wildlife expert. Asking the head I have now to explain its own thinking is as pointless as dialing your own telephone number on your own telephone: Either way, you get an engaged signal. Or your own answer message, if you have that kind of phone system.
It took me an embarrassing amount of time to realize that other people have heads, and that any one of these heads would do a better job of explaining what the purpose of my explosion might have been. This, I supposed, was why people persisted with the whole notion of friends.Speaker: Nick HornbyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 9:03 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Once you stop pretending that everything’s shitty and you can’t wait to get out of it, which is the story I’d been telling myself for a while, then it gets more painful, not less. Telling yourself life is shit is like an anesthetic, and when you stop taking the Advil, then you really can tell how much it hurts, and where, and it’s not like that kind of pain does anyone a whole lot of good.
Speaker: Nick HornbyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 9:02 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
What I owned up to was this: I had wanted to kill myself, not because I hated living, but because I loved it. And the truth of the matter is, I think, that a lot of people who think about killing themselves feel the same way – I think that’s how Maureen and Jess and Martin feel. They love life, but it’s all fucked up for them, and that’s why I met them, and that’s why we’re all still around. We were up on the roof because we couldn’t find a way back into life, and being shut out of it like that… It just fucking destroys you, man. So it’s like an act of despair, not an act of nihilism. It’s a mercy killing, not a murder.
Speaker: Nick HornbyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 9:01 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment!