Browsing Quotes With Tag: long-way-down (32)
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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! -
There are other ways of dying, without killing yourself. You can let parts of yourself die. Jess’s mother had let her face die, and I watched it come to life again.
Speaker: Nick HornbyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 9:01 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Oh, but I know what you need to keep yourself going. That probably sounds funny, considering why we were all in there in that coffee bar in the first place. But the fact is that so far I have kept myself going, even if I had to climb the stairs to the roof of Toppers’ House to do it. Sometimes you just need to give things a tiny little jiggle. You just need to think that perhaps someone might have helped themselves to their own earrings, and your part of the world looks like somewhere you could live in for a while.
Speaker: Nick HornbyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 9:00 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
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. Maybe not out loud, if it’s going to get you into trouble: “I wish I’d never married him.” “I wish she was still alive.” “I wish I’d never had kids with her.” “I wish I had a whole shitload of money.” “I wish all the Albanians would go back to fucking Albania.” Whatever it is, say it to yourself. The truth will set you free. Either that or it’ll get you a punch in the nose. Surviving in whatever life you’re living means lying, and lying corrodes the soul, so take a break from the lies just for one minute.
Speaker: Nick HornbyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 9:00 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
That seemed about right to me, ten minutes an hour. It was probably about right for the program, because he was a detective, and it was more important for him and for the viewers that he spent the biggest chunk of his time on solving the murders. But I think even if you’re not in a TV program, then ten minutes an hour is about right for your problems. This David Fawley was unemployed, so there was a fair old chance that he spent sixty minutes an hour thinking about his ex-wife and his children, and when you do that, you’re bound to end up on the roof of Toppers’ House.
Speaker: Nick HornbyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:59 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
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 understand them better, and so you end up in a terrible muddle and needing to talk to a priest. I decided I wouldn’t sit in the window seat on the way back.
Speaker: Nick HornbyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:58 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“Don’t pretend to be more foolish than you are, Jess,” said Maureen. “Because you’re foolish enough as it is.”
Speaker: Nick HornbyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:57 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
It’s music rage, which is like road rage, only more righteous. When you get road rage, a tiny part of you knows you’re being a jerk, but when you get music rage, you’re carrying out the will of God, and God wants these people dead.
Speaker: Nick HornbyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:57 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
When you’re unhappy, I guess everything in the world – reading, eating, sleeping – has something buried somewhere inside it that just makes you unhappier.
Speaker: Nick HornbyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:57 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
People go on about places like Starbucks being unpersonal and all that, but what if that’s what you want? I’d be lost if JJ and people like that got their way, and there was nothing unpersonal in the world. I like to know that there are big places without windows where no one gives a shit. You need confidence to go into small places with regular customers – small bookshops and small music shops and small restaurants and cafes. I’m happiest in the Virgin Megastore and Borders and Starbucks and PizzaExpress, where no one gives a shit, and no one knows who you are. My mum and dad are always going on about how soulless those places are, and I’m like, Der. That’s the point.
Speaker: Nick HornbyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:56 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Most people have a rope that ties them to someone, and that rope can be short or it can be long. (Be long. Belong. Get it?) you don’t know how long, though. It’s not your choice. Maureen’s rope ties her to Matty and it’s about six inches long and it’s killing her. Martin’s rope ties him to his daughters and, like a stupid dog, he thinks it isn’t there. He goes running off somewhere – into a nightclub after a girl, up a building, whatever – and then suddenly it brings him up short and chokes him and he acts surprised, and then he does the same thing again the next day.
Speaker: Nick HornbyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:55 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“No, I get it,” said Jess.
“Yeah?”
“Course I do. You’re fucked.” She waved an apologetic hand in Maureen’s direction, like a tennis player acknowledging a lucky net cord. “You thought you were going to be someone, but now it’s obvious you’re nobody. You haven’t got as much talent as you thought you had, and there was no Plan B, and you got no skills and no education, and now you’re looking at forty or fifty years of nothing. Less than nothing, probably. That’s pretty heavy. That’s worse than having the brain thing, because what you got now will take a lot longer to kill you. You’ve got the choice of a slow, painful death, or a quick, merciful one.”
She shrugged.
She was right. She got it.Speaker: Nick HornbyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:55 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
How do people, like, not curse? How is it possible? There are all these gaps in speech where you just have to put a “fuck.” I’ll tell you who the most admirable people in the world are: newscasters. If that was me, I’d be like, “And the motherfuckers flew the fucking plane right into the Twin Towers.” How could you not, if you’re a human being? Maybe they’re not so admirable. Maybe they’re robot zombies.
Speaker: Nick HornbyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:54 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“You’re seeing someone else, aren’t you?” I denied it of course. But then, anything – smashing up a new car, persuading Donald Rumsfeld to come to an Islington flat in the early hours of New Year’s Day – is easier than actually telling the truth. That look you get, the look which lets you see right through the eyes and down into the place where she keeps all the hurt and the rage and the loathing… Who wouldn’t go that extra yard to avoid it?
Speaker: Nick HornbyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:54 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
What were the chances, eh? One in a million? One in ten million? I don’t know. But of course even one in ten million means that there are a lot of women like me in the world. That’s not what you think of, when you think of one in ten million. You don’t think, That’s a lot of people.
Speaker: Nick HornbyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:53 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
It wasn’t true that women were fucking maniacs, of course it wasn’t – just the ones that I had slept with and Chas had slept with.
Speaker: Nick HornbyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:52 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment!