Nick Hornby
But what else can we do when we're so weak? We invest hours each day, months each year, years each lifetime in something over which we have no control; it is any wonder then, that we are reduced to creating ingenious but bizarre liturgies designed to give us the illusion that we are powerful after all, just as every other primitive community has done when faced with a deep and apparently impenetrable mystery?Collection: Powerful
Several months later, and I have finally read one of the three (books), 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.Collection: Book
If you really wanted to mess me up, you should have got to me earlier.Collection: Should Have
Loving people, and allowing yourself to be loved, was only worth the risk if the odds were in your favor, 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?Collection: Smart
Reading begets reading.Collection: Reading
The truth about autobiographical songs, he realized, was that you had to make the present become the past, somehow: you had to take a feeling or a friend or a woman and turn whatever it was into something that was over, so that you could be definitive about it. You had to put it in a glass case and look at it and think about it until it gave up its meaning.Collection: Song
Clockers" asks--almost in passing, and there's a lot more to it than this--a pretty interesting question: if you choose to work for the minimum wage when everyone around you is pocketing thousands from drug deals, then what does that do to you, to your head and to your heart? (Hornby's thoughts after reading "Clockers" by Richard Price)Collection: Reading
The point is you keep going. You want to. So all the things that make you want to are the point.Collection: Want
It takes a child to say the unsayable.Collection: Children
A middle-aged woman who looked like someone's cleaning lady, a shrieking adolescent lunatic and a talkshow host with an orange face... It didn't add up. Suicide wasn't invented for people like this. It was invented for people like Virginia Woolf and Nick Drake. And Me. Suicide was supposed to be cool.Collection: Suicide
We spent all those years talking about stuff we had in common, and the last few months noticing all the ways we were different and it broke both of our hearts.Collection: Heart
Tuesday night I reorganized my record collection. I often do this at periods of emotional stress. There are some people who would find this a pretty dull way to spend an evening, but I'm not one of them. This is my life, and it's nice to be able to wade in it, immerse your arms in it, touch it.Collection: Nice
The non-fiction bestseller lists frequently prove that we all want to know more about everything, even if we didn't know that we wanted to know - we're just waiting for the right person to come along and tell us about it.Collection: Waiting
You know that things aren't going well for you when you can't even tell people the simplest fact about your life, just because they'll presume you're asking them to feel sorry for you.Collection: Sorry
my friends don't seem to be friends at all but people whose phone numbers I haven't lost.Collection: Phones
You spend Christmas at somebody's house, you worry about their operations, you give them hugs and kisses and flowers, you see them in their dressing gown...and then bang, that's it. Gone forever. And sooner or later there will be another mum, another Christmas, more varicose veins. They're all the same. Only the addresses, and the colors of the dressing gown, change.Collection: Flower
Maybe the best thing to do with favorite 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.Collection: Book
I used to believe, although I don't now, that growing and growing up are analogous, that both are inevitable and uncontrollable processes. Now it seems to me that growing up is governed by the will, that one can choose to become an adult, but only at given moments. These moments come along fairly infrequently -during crises in relationships, for example, or when one has been given the chance to start afresh somewhere- and one can ignore them or seize them.Collection: Growing Up
All I know is that you can get very little from a book that is making you weep with the effort of reading it. You won’t remember it, and you’ll learn nothing from it, and you’ll be less likely to choose a book over Big Brother next time you have a choice.Collection: Brother
contemporary poetry is a kind of Reykjavik, a place where accessibility and intelligence have been fighting a Cold War by proxy for the last half-century.Collection: War
It struck him that how you spent Christmas was a message to the world about where you were in life, some indication of how deep a hole you had managed to burrow for yourselfCollection: Christmas
I’m not the smartest guy in the world, but I’m certainly not the dumbest. I mean, I’ve read books like "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" and "Love in the Time of Cholera", and I think I’ve understood them. They’re about girls, right? Just kidding. But I have to say my all-time favorite book is Johnny Cash’s autobiography "Cash" by Johnny Cash.Collection: Girl
Everyone disliked their partners at some time or another, she knew that. But she’d spent her hours in the dark wondering whether she’d ever liked him. Would it really have been so much worse to spend those years alone? Why did there have to be someone else in the room while she was eating, watching TV, sleeping?Collection: Sleep
And what would happen if we never read the classics? There comes a point in life, it seems to me, where you have to decide whether you're a Person of Letters or merely someone who loves books, and I'm beginning to see that the book lovers have more fun.Collection: Fun
My own feeling about JJ, without knowing anything about him, was that he might have been a gay person, because he had long hair and spoke American. A lot of Americans are gay people, aren’t they? I know they didn’t invent gayness, because they say that was the Greeks. But they helped bring it back into fashion. Being gay was a bit like the Olympics: it disappeared in ancient times, and then they brought it back in the twentieth century. Anyway, I didn’t know anything about gays, so I just presumed they were all unhappy and wanted to kill themselves.Collection: Fashion
No man is an island.Collection: Men
...I feel as though I made a face and the wind changed, and now I have to go through life grimacing in this horrible way.Collection: Wind
I fell in love with football as I was later to fall in love with women: suddenly, inexplicably, uncritically, giving no thought to the pain or disruption it would bring with it.Collection: Football
We are never allowed to forget that some books are badly written; we should remember that sometimes they’re badly read, too.Collection: Book
I’m simply pointing out that what happens to us isn’t the whole story. That I continue to exist even when we’re not together.Collection: Stories
Every time people force themselves to carry on with a book they’re not enjoying, they reinforce the idea that reading is a duty.Collection: Reading
I really don’t want to be boring, and so many books are so boring!Collection: Book
Books are, let’s face it, better than everything else.Collection: Book
It is the act of reading itself that I miss, the opportunity to retreat further and further from the world until I have found some space, some air that isn’t stale, that hasn’t been breathed by my family a thousand times already.Collection: Reading