“People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands - literally thousands - of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss.”
― Nick Hornby, quote from High Fidelity
“What came first – the music or the misery? Did I listen to the music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to the music? Do all those records turn you into a melancholy person?”
― Nick Hornby, quote from High Fidelity
“It's brilliant, being depressed; you can behave as badly as you like.”
― Nick Hornby, quote from High Fidelity
“Sentimental music has this great way of taking you back somewhere at the same time that it takes you forward, so you feel nostagic and hopeful all at the same time.”
― Nick Hornby, quote from High Fidelity
“I've committed to nothing...and that's just suicide...by tiny, tiny increments.”
― Nick Hornby, quote from High Fidelity
“I'm very good at the past. It's the present I can't understand.”
― Nick Hornby, quote from High Fidelity
“Over the last couple of years, the photos of me when I was a kid... well, they've started to give me a little pang or something - not unhappiness, exactly, but some kind of quiet, deep regret... I keep wanting to apologize to the little guy: "I'm sorry, I've let you down. I was the person who was supposed to look after you, but I blew it: I made wrong decisions at bad times, and I turned you into me.”
― Nick Hornby, quote from High Fidelity
“Those days are gone, and good fucking riddance to them; unhappiness really meant something back then. Now it's just a drag, like a cold or having no money. If you really wanted to mess me up, you should have got to me earlier.”
― Nick Hornby, quote from High Fidelity
“Maybe we all live life at too high a pitch, those of us who absorb emotional things all day, and as mere 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.”
― Nick Hornby, quote from High Fidelity
“If you really wanted to mess me up, you should have got to me earlier.”
― Nick Hornby, quote from High Fidelity
“…I've had a bad week."
What's happened?"
Nothing's happened. I've had a bad week in my head, is all.”
― Nick Hornby, quote from High Fidelity
“I've been thinking with my guts since I was fourteen years old, and frankly speaking, between you and me, I have come to the conclusion that my guts have shit for brains.”
― Nick Hornby, quote from High Fidelity
“I lost the plot for a while then. And I lost the subplot, the script, the soundtrack, the intermission, my popcorn, the credits, and the exit sign.”
― Nick Hornby, quote from High Fidelity
“It's a mystery of human chemistry and I don't understand it, some people, as far as their senses are concerned, just feel like home.”
― Nick Hornby, quote from High Fidelity
“Have you got any soul?" a woman asks the next afternoon. That depends, I feel like saying; some days yes, some days no. A few days ago I was right out; now I've got loads, too much, more than I can handle. I wish I could spread it a bit more evenly, I want to tell her, get a better balance, but I can't seem to get it sorted. I can see she wouldn't be interested in my internal stock control problems though, so I simply point to where I keep the soul I have, right by the exit, just next to the blues.”
― Nick Hornby, quote from High Fidelity
“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 to 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.”
― Nick Hornby, quote from High Fidelity
“It's not what you like but what you are like that's important.”
― Nick Hornby, quote from High Fidelity
“It's no wonder we're all such a mess, is it? We're like Tom Hanks in Big. Little boys and girls trapped in adult bodies and forced to get on with it. ”
― Nick Hornby, quote from High Fidelity
“A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do. You've got to kick off with a corker, to hold the attention (I started with 'Got To Get You Off My Mind', but then realised that she might not get any further than track one, side one if I delivered what she wanted straight away, so I buried it in the middle of side two), and then you've got to up it a notch, and you can't have white music and black music together, unless the white music sounds like black music, and you can't have two tracks by the same artist side by side, unless you've done the whole thing in pairs, and ... oh there are loads of rules.”
― Nick Hornby, quote from High Fidelity
“Is it wrong, wanting to be at home with your record collection? It's not like collecting records is like collecting stamps, or beermats, or antique thimbles. There's a whole world in here, a nicer, dirtier, more violent, more peaceful, more colorful, sleazier, more dangerous, more loving world than the world I live in; there is history, and geography, and poetry, and countless other things I should have studied at school, including music.”
― Nick Hornby, quote from High Fidelity
“my friends don't seem to be friends at all but people whose phone numbers I haven't lost.”
― Nick Hornby, quote from High Fidelity
“What came first, the music or the misery? People worry about kids playing with guns, or watching violent videos, that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands, literally thousands of songs about heartbreak, rejection, pain, misery and loss. Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?"- Rob”
― Nick Hornby, quote from High Fidelity
“Did I do and say these things? Yes, I did. Are there any mitigating circumstances? Not really, unless any circumstances {in other words, context) can be regarded as mitigating. And before you judge, although you have probably already done so, go away and write down the four worst things you have done to a partner, even if - especially if - your partner doesn't know about them. Don't dress things up, or try to explain them; just write them down, in a list, in the plainest language possible. Finished? Ok, so who's the arsehole now?”
― Nick Hornby, quote from High Fidelity
“(About Love)The most important thing in life, and you can't tell whether people have it or not. Surely this is wrong? Surely people who are happy should look happy, at all times, no matter how much money they have or how uncomfortable their shoes are or how little their child is sleeping; and people who are doing OK but have still not found their soul-mate should look, I don't know, anxious, like Billy Crystal in When Harry Met Sally; and people who are desperate should wear something, a yellow ribbon maybe, which would allow them to be identified by similar desperate people. ”
― Nick Hornby, quote from High Fidelity
“That’s why; he’s worried about how his life is turning out, and he’s lonely, and lonely people are the bitterest of them all”
― Nick Hornby, quote from High Fidelity
“Look at all the things that can go wrong for men. There’s the nothing-happening-at-all problem, the too-much-happening-too-soon problem, the dismal-droop-after-a-promising-beginning problem; there’s the size-doesn’t-matter-except-in-my-case problem, the failing-to-deliver-the-goods problem…and what do women have to worry about? A handful of cellulite? Join the club. A spot of I-wonder-how-I-rank? Ditto.”
― Nick Hornby, quote from High Fidelity
“It would be nice to think that as I've got older times have changed, relationships have become more sophisticated, females less cruel, skins thicker, reactions sharper, instincts more developed. But there still seems to be an element of that evening in everything that happened to me since; all my other romantic stories seem to be a scrambled version of that first one. Of course, I have never had to take that long walk again, and my ears have not burned with quite the same fury, and I have never had to count the packs of cheap cigarettes in order to avoid mocking eyes and floods of tears... not really, not actually, not as such. It just feels that way, sometimes.”
― Nick Hornby, quote from High Fidelity
“One day, maybe not in the next few weeks, but certainly in the conceivable future, someone will be able to refer to me without using the word 'arse' somewhere in the sentence. ”
― Nick Hornby, quote from High Fidelity
“I don't even feel as if I'm the center of my own world, so how am I supposed to feel as though I'm the center of anyone else's?”
― Nick Hornby, quote from High Fidelity
“The unhappiest people I know, romantically speaking, are the ones who like pop music the most; and I don't know whether pop music has caused this unhappiness, but I do know that they've been listening to the sad songs longer than they've been living the unhappy lives.”
― Nick Hornby, quote from High Fidelity
Nick Hornby
Born place: in Redhill, Surrey, England, The United Kingdom
Born date April 17, 1957
See more on GoodReads
“I tried not to think of Uncle Ray as being gone forever. I just liked to imagine him on one really long Lost Weekend.”
― Lisa Lutz, quote from Curse of the Spellmans
“Aquinas said if you have knowledge you don’t need faith, and I think he was on to something, but for now all I can do is find the Church of Inadvertent Joy, and if and when I do, I’ll stumble in and drop fifty cents in the brass-plated poor box, ignite a beeswax candle and confess myself at the crossroads. Having professed my faithlessness, I will be blessed, and the psoriasis or eczema that’s thickened my feet and shattered the skin of my hands will instantly melt, for confession is good for the sole and fine for the fingers. Aquinas also said evil is a privation, ergo hell is a place that’s a void. The heavenly need for placement being motivation for all maps, including a face.”
― Vanessa Place, quote from La Medusa
“Your body falling through space touches the deepest part of me.”
― Yōko Ogawa, quote from The Diving Pool: Three Novellas
“because there may be a few coincidences in life, but none in crime. Everything has a motive.”
― Linda Howard, quote from Mackenzie's Mountain
“When something extraordinary shows up in your life in the middle of the night, you give it a name and make it the best home you can.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, quote from High Tide in Tucson
Dexter By Design
Apex Hides the Hurt
The Collected Poems...
Bad Monkeys
The Back Door of Mid...BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.
