Browsing Quotes With Tag: trials (76)
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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! -
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! -
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! -
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! -
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! -
Men are not angered my mere misfortune but by misfortune conceived as injury. And the sense of injury depends on the feeling that a legitimate claim has been denied. The more claims on life, therefore, that your patient can be induced to make, the more often he will feel injured and, as a result, ill-tempered.
Speaker: C.S. LewisPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:38 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
He cannot ‘tempt’ to virtue as we do to vice. He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away His hand; and if only the will to walk is really there He is pleased with their stumbles… Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.
Speaker: C.S. LewisPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:34 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
The Enemy allows this disappointment to occur on the threshold of every human endeavour. It occurs when the boy who had been enchanted in the nursery by “stories from the Odyssey” buckles down to really learning Greek. It occurs when lovers have got married and begin the real task of learning to live together. In every department of life it marks the transition from dreaming aspiration to laborious doing… and their lies our opportunity. But also, remember, there lies our danger. If once they get through this initial dryness successfully, they become much less dependent on emotion and therefore harder to tempt.
Speaker: C.S. LewisPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:25 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted. And experience is often the most valuable thing you have to offer.
Speaker: Randy PauschPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 7:55 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
The brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They’re there to stop the other people.
Speaker: Randy PauschPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 7:52 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
I couldn’t face the loss of Khaderbhai, my father-dream. I’d helped to bury him, for God’s sake, with my own hands. But I didn’t grieve, and I didn’t mourn him. There wasn’t enough truth in me for that kind of sorrowing because my heart wouldn’t believe him dead. I’d loved him too much, it seemed to me in that winter of war, for him to simply be gone, to be dead. If so much love could vanish into the earth and speak no more, smile no more, then love was nothing. And I wouldn’t believe that. I was sure there had to be a pay-off, somehow, and I kept waiting for it. I didn’t know then, as I do now, that love’s a one-way street. Love, like respect, isn’t something you get; it’s something you give.
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 7:27 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Everything you ever sense, in touch or taste or sight or even thought, has an effect on you that’s greater than zero. Some things, like the background sound of a bird chirping as it passes your house in the evening, or a flower glimpsed out of the corner of an eye, have such an infinitesimally small effect that you can’t detect them. Some things, like triumph and heartbreak, and some images, like the image of yourself reflected in the eyes of a man you’ve just stabbed, attach themselves to the secret gallery and change your life forever.
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 10:01 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Everything you ever sense, in touch or taste or sight or even thought, has an effect on you that’s greater than zero. Some things, like the background sound of a bird chirping as it passes your house in the evening, or a flower glimpsed out of the corner of an eye, have such an infinitesimally small effect that you can’t detect them. Some things, like triumph and heartbreak, and some images, like the image of yourself reflected in the eyes of a man you’ve just stabbed, attach themselves to the secret gallery and change your life forever.
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 10:01 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
You can never tell what people have inside them until you start taking it away, one hope at a time.
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 9:54 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
The devil, they say, is in the details, and I knew well the devils that lurked and skulked in the details of my own story. But she had given me a hoard of new treasures. I’d learned more about here in that exhausted, murmuring hour than in all the many months before it. Lovers find their way by such insights and confidences: they’re the stars we use to navigate the ocean of desire. And the brightest of those stars are the heartbreaks and sorrows. The most precious gift you can bring to your lover is your suffering. So I took each sadness she confessed to me, and pinned it to the sky.
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 9:33 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
It’s a characteristic of human nature that the best qualities, called up quickly in a crisis, are very often the hardest to find in a prosperous calm. The contours of all our virtues are shaped by adversity.
Speaker: Gregory David RobertsPosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 9:28 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment!