Quotes from Nick Hornby

I can see everything once it's already happened—I'm very good at the past. It's the present I can't understand.

She regretted the explanation immediately, but that was because she always regretted everything

listen, pal. I came here because I knew how worried you must be. But if you're going to talk to me like that, I'll fuck off home. The word racist brightened a little: the Anglo- Saxon was striking back against the Roman invader.

A few years ago, Cindy joined one of those dreadful reading groups, where unhappy, repressed middle class lesbians talk for five minutes about some novel they don't understand and then spend the rest of the evening moaning about how dreadful men are.

When we first split up, he called me a stalker, but that's like an emotive word, stalker, isn't it? I don't think you can call it stalking when it's just phone calls and letters and emails and knocking on the door. And I only turned up at his work twice. Three times, if you count his Christmas party, which I don't, because he said he was going to take me to that anyway.

They were all waiting for a man. Men were going to scoop them up in a net and take them home and put them into an even smaller tank. Not all of them were waiting to find a man, because some of them had already found one, but it didn't stop the waiting. A few were waiting for a man to make up his mind and fewer still, the lucky ones, were waiting for a man who'd already made up his mind to make enough money. Barbara

So it's not about what you do. It can't be, can it? It has to be about how you are, how you love, how you treat yourself and those around you, and

Man kann sich über jeden lustig machen, der unglücklich ist, man muss nur grausam genug sein.

Several months later, and I have finally read one of the three, even though I wanted to read all three of them immediately. (What happened in between? Other books, is what happened. Other books, other moods, other obligations, other appetites, other reading journeys.)

the sum of her depression was much greater than its parts

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 a camera with nothing to do and nobody to speak to, and who'd believe this character then?

Barbara began to imagine the pretty girls working in Derry and Toms as beautiful tropical fish in a tank, swimming up and down, up and down, in serene disappointment, with nowhere to go and nothing to see that they hadn't seen a million times before.

easily the best thing in her life at the moment was her secret.

I should warn, you, Duncan: I'm not going to fight for you. The whole point of you is that you're not the sort of person anyone fights over. You're my easy life option. The moment you stop being that, you're no option at all.

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.

There was an awful lot to be said for familiarity, if you thought about it. It was an extremely underrated virtue, ignorable until the very moment that you were in danger of losing whatever or whoever it was that was familiar—a house, a view, a partner.

That's what family stories were—amusing accounts of the messes and the fuckups. Take away the love and the laughter, narrate the stories as if the characters had acted with malice and self-absorption, and everybody was in a bleak independent film about alcoholism and schizophrenia and child abuse.

The trouble with history, it seems to me, is that there are too many people involved.

Musicians had been assholes since the day the lute was invented

And if you never go anywhere or do anything, life is cheap.

I remember the juvenile stuff, where you put your arm along the sofa and let it drop onto her shoulder, or press your leg against hers; I remember the mock-tough adult stuff I used to try when I was in my mid-twenties, where I looked someone in the eye and asked if they wanted to stay the night. But none of that seems appropriate anymore. What do you do when you're old enough to know better?

Jackie and Phil are the most boring people in the southeast of England, possibly because they've been married too long, and therefore have nothing to talk about, apart from how long they've been married. In the end, I am reduced to asking them, in a joking sort of way, for the secret of their success; I was only saving time, because I think they would have told me anyway.

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Of course things like that complicate life, and there are all kinds of readjustments to think about, battles to fight and lines to draw.