Browsing Quotes With Tag: high-fidelity (20)
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“See, I’ve always been afraid of marriage because of, you know, ball and chain, I want my freedom, all that. But when I was thinking about that stupid girl I suddenly saw it was the opposite: that if you got married to someone you know you love, and you sort yourself out, it frees you up for other things. I know you don’t know how you feel about me, but I do know how I feel about you. I know I want to stay with you and I keep pretending otherwise, to myself and you, and we just limp on and on. It’s like we sign a new contract every few weeks or so, and I don’t want that anymore. And I know that if we got married I’d take it seriously, and I wouldn’t want to mess about.”
“And you can make a decision about it just like that, can you? In cold blood, bang bang, if I do that, then this will happen? I’m not sure that it works like that.”
“But it does, you see. Just because it’s a relationship, and it’s based on soppy stuff, it doesn’t mean you can’t make intellectual decisions about it. Sometimes you just have to, otherwise you’ll never get anywhere. That’s where I’ve been going wrong. I’ve been letting the weather and my stomach muscles and a great chord change in a Pretenders single make up my mind for me, and I want to do it for myself.”Speaker: Nick HornbyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 9:23 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
I know what’s wrong with Laura. What’s wrong with Laura is that I’ll never see her for the first or second or third time again. I’ll never spend two or three days in a sweat trying to remember what she looks like, never again will I get to a pub a half an hour early to meet her, staring at the same article in a magazine and looking at my watch every thirty seconds, never again will thinking about her set something off in me like “Let’s Get It On” sets something off in me.
Speaker: Nick HornbyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 9:22 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Women get it wrong when they complain about the media images of women. Men understand that not everyone had Bardot’s breasts, or Jamie Lee Curtis’ neck, or Cindy Crawford’s bottom, and we don’t mind at all. Obviously we’d take Kim Basinger over Phyllis Diller, just as women would take Keanu Reeves over Sergeant Bilko, but it’s not the body that’s important, it’s the level of abasement. We worked out very quickly that Bond girls were out of our league, but the realization that women won’t ever look at us the way Ursula Andress looked at Sean Connery, or even in the way that Doris day looked at Rock Hudson, was much slower to arrive, for most of us. In my case, I’m not at all sure that it ever did.
…It’s much harder to get used to the idea that my little-boy notion of romance, of negligees and candlelit dinners at home and long, smoldering glances, had no basis in reality at all. That’s what women ought to get all steamed up about; that’s why we can’t function properly in a relationship. It’s not the cellulite or the crow’s feet. It’s the…the… the disrespect.Speaker: Nick HornbyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 9:21 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“That’s the point of us. You have potential. I’m here to bring it out.”
“Potential as what?”
“As a human being. You have all the basic ingredients. You’re really very 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.”
“No,” is all I can think of to say.
“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.”Speaker: Nick HornbyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 9:20 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“It’s no wonder we’re all in such a mess, is it? We’re like Tom Hanks in Big. Little boys and girls trapped in adult bodies and force us to get on with it. And its much worse in real life, because it’s not just snogging and bunk beds, is it? There’s all this as well.”
Speaker: Nick HornbyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 9:19 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
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!