Browsing Quotes With Tag: relationships (34)
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What planet did this woman live on? She was so unworldly that she seemed to him to be an unlikely suicidal depressive, even though she sang with her eyes closed: surely anyone who floated that high above everything was protected in some way? But of course that was part of the problem. They were sitting here because a twelve-year-old’s craftiness had brought her crashing down to earth, and if Marcus could do it, any boyfriend or boss or landlord – any adult who didn’t love her – could do it. There was no protection in that. Why did these people want to make things so hard for themselves? It was easy life, easy peasy, a matter of simple arithmetic: loving people, and allowing yourself to be loved, was only worth the risk if the odds were in your favour, but they quite clearly weren’t. There were about seventy-nine squillion people in the world, and if you were very lucky, you would end up being loved by fifteen or twenty of them. So how smart did you have to be to work out that it just wasn’t worth the risk?
Speaker: Nick HornbySource: About a BoyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 10:21 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“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! -
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! -
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! -
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! -
“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!