Quotes from Nick Hornby

C'era forse un posto più noioso al mondo del British Museum? Se c'era, Will non voleva sapere quale. Vasi. Monete. Brocche. Intere sale piene di piatti. Secondo Will doveva esserci uno scopo per mettere in mostra delle cose, e il fatto che fossero vecchie non significava necessariamente che fossero interessanti. Solo perché erano sopravvissute al tempo, non significava che tu volessi guardarle

you had to do, it seemed, was ask for an inferior version of the life you'd had before and London would give it to you.

L'amore, evidentemente, è antidemocratico come il denaro: si accumula attorno a persone che ne hanno già fin troppo: i sani di mente, i sani nel corpo, gli amabili

Als je hem voor de Nacht Zonder Jazz zou hebben gevraagd waar hij gelukkig van werd, dan zou hij niet goed hebben begrepen hoe relevant die vraag was. Nu wist hij het antwoord: naar bed gaan met Lucy, eten bij Lucy, tv-kijken met Lucy. En misschien zat daar geen toekomst in, maar het was het heden, en daar bestaat het leven uit.

And he'd agreed with her about all of it, except he hadn't agreed really; he'd just lost the arguments.

It happened and I wish it didn't, it's just life isn't it

I can handle the pain, it's the hope that kills me.

names are really fascist and don't allow us to express ourselves as human beings, and turn us into one thing.

People who were born in '66 are nearly fifty? I know the show's fifty, but it seems like yesterday. Human years are different. I'd have guessed that Tim was twenty-five for thirty.

I loved him.' 'You didn't know him.' 'Of course I knew him. I listened to him sing every single day. The things he sings about, that's him. I know him better than I know you. He understood me.

Maybe the best thing to do with favorite films and books is to leave them be: to achieve such an exalted position means that they entered your life at exactly the right time, in precisely the right place, and those conditions can never be re-created.

Once again, Marcus was left with the feeling that Ellie didn't have to do what she had just done, and that she had brought the trouble she was in upon herself. He was tired of it. It wasn't real, and there was enough real trouble in the world without having to invent things.

There were no more hurdles. Now all they had to do was walk, and see how far they could get.

I didn't want people feeling sorry for me, you see. I wanted them to help, even if helping meant saying that they wouldn't help

It seemed that whether you felt something, or whether you felt nothing, it didn't matter: your responses were off either way.

Learning to read happens once and once only for most of us, and for the vast majority of adults in first-world countries it happened a long time ago. You have to dig deep, deep down into the bog of the almost lost, and then carry what you have found carefully to the surface, and then you have to find the words and images to describe what you see on your spade.

Maybe the best thing to do with favourite books is to leave them be: to achieve such exalted position means that they entered your life at exactly the right time, in precisely the right place, and those conditions can never be recreated.

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

Sensitive people find it harder to stick around.

I'm OK. Really. I can find people. I'll be all right.

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.

Ya sé que no debería gustarme esa canción, pero me gusta.

You could shut life out. If you didn't answer the door to it, how was it going to get in?

What it was really about was people not having sex when they wanted it. A lot of British comedy was about that, Barbara had noticed.