“The plain state of being human is dramatic enough for anyone; you don't need to be a heroin addict or a performance poet to experience extremity. You just have to love someone.”
― Nick Hornby, quote from How to Be Good
“You don't ask people with knives in their stomachs what would make them happy; happiness is no longer the point. It's all about survival; it's all about whether you pull the knife out and bleed to death or keep it in...”
― Nick Hornby, quote from How to Be Good
“It seems to me now that the plain state of being human is dramatic enough for anyone; you don't need to be a heroin addict or a performance poet to experience extremity. You just have to love someone.”
― Nick Hornby, quote from How to Be Good
“Love, it turns out, is as undemocratic as money, so it accumulates around people who have plenty of it already: the sane, the healthy, the lovable.”
― Nick Hornby, quote from How to Be Good
“I don't believe in Heaven or anything. But I want to be the kind of person that qualifies for entry anyway.”
― Nick Hornby, quote from How to Be Good
“That is another chamber of my heart that shows no electrical activity - the chamber that used to flicker into life when I saw a film that moved me, or read a book that inspired me, or listened to music that made me want to cry. I closed that chamber myself, for all the usual reasons. And now I seem to have made a pact with some philistine devil: if I don't attempt to re-open it, I will be allowed just enough energy and optimism to get through a working day without wanting to hang myself.”
― Nick Hornby, quote from How to Be Good
“I'm human. That's how humans spend their time, doing shitty things.”
― Nick Hornby, quote from How to Be Good
“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.”
― Nick Hornby, quote from How to Be Good
“So now what? What happens when words fail us?”
― Nick Hornby, quote from How to Be Good
“Do you ever do that thing where you lie in bed and you can't sleep so you end up writing out recent conversation you've had? So they look like a play?'
Well you should. It's fun. I keep them. Look through them, sometimes.”
― Nick Hornby, quote from How to Be Good
“Phone calls like ours only happen when you've spent several years hurting and being hurt, until every work you utter or hear becomes coded and loaded, as complicated and full of subtext as a bleak and brilliant play.”
― Nick Hornby, quote from How to Be Good
“It's love this and love that but of couse it's so easy to love someone you don't know, whether it's George Clooney or Monkey. Staying civil to someone with whom you've ever shared Christmas turkey- now there's a miracle.”
― Nick Hornby, quote from How to Be Good
“It takes a child to say the unsayable.”
― Nick Hornby, quote from How to Be Good
“He has the personality of a child prodigy, but no discernable talent.”
― Nick Hornby, quote from How to Be Good
“I burst into tears and I cry and cry until it feels as though it is not salt and water being squeezed from my eyes, but blood.”
― Nick Hornby, quote from How to Be Good
“I've developed contours for his elbows and knees and bum, and nobody else quite fits into me in quite the same way”
― Nick Hornby, quote from How to Be Good
“What you don't catch a glimpse of on your wedding day- because how could you?- is that some days you will hate your spouse, that you will look at him and regret ever exhchanging a word with him, let alone a ring and bodily fluids.”
― Nick Hornby, quote from How to Be Good
“I'd thought I'd live with my wife, but I couldn't find one.”
― Nick Hornby, quote from How to Be Good
“You'd think that even a bad doctor on a bad day would feel better than a good drug dealer on a good day, but I suspect that this might not be true. I suspect that drug dealers have days when everything clicks, and it's all buzz buzz buzz, and they chalk off their jobs one by one, and they return home with a sense of accomplishment.”
― Nick Hornby, quote from How to Be Good
“Cynicism is our shared common language, the Esperanto that actually caught on, and though I'm not fluent in it - I like too many things, and I'm not envious of enough people - I know enough to get by.”
― Nick Hornby, quote from How to Be Good
“The point is not that my life is one long golden summer which I am simply too self-absorbed to appreciate (although it might be, of course, and I am simply too self-absorbed to appreciate it), but that happy moments are possible, and while happy moments are possible I have no right to demand anything more for myself, given the havoc that would be wrought.”
― Nick Hornby, quote from How to Be Good
“It was as if I were powerless to resist the temptation; my senses were overcome. I could hear the emptiness, and taste the silence, and smell the solitude, and I wanted it more than I have ever wanted anything before.”
― Nick Hornby, quote from How to Be Good
“I work it out. It is the act of reading itself I miss, the opportunity to retreat further and further from the wold until I have found some space, some air that isn't stale, that hasn't been breathed by my family a thousand times already.”
― Nick Hornby, quote from How to Be Good
“You see, what I really want, and what I'm getting with Stephen, is the opportunity to rebuild myself from scratch. David's picture of me is complete now, and I'm pretty sure neither of us likes it much; I want to rip the page out and start again on a fresh sheet, just like I used to do when I was a kid and had messed a drawing up. It doesn't even matter who the fresh sheet is, really, so its beside the point whether I like Stephen, or whether he knows what to do with me in bed, or anything like that. I just want his rapt attention when I tell him that my favorite book is Middlemarch, and i just want that feeling, the feeling I get with him, of having not gone wrong yet”
― Nick Hornby, quote from How to Be Good
“I can live this life. I can. I can. It's a spark I want to cherish, a splutter of life in the flat battery; but just at the wrong moment I catch a glimpse at the night sky..., and I can see that there's nothing out there at all.”
― Nick Hornby, quote from How to Be Good
“I'm still not a very good white wine, but I'm drinkable - you could put me in a punch, anyway.”
― Nick Hornby, quote from How to Be Good
“When I look at my sins (and if I think they’re sins, then they are sins), I can see the appeal of born-again Christianity. I suspect that it’s not the Christianity that is so alluring; it’s the rebirth. Because who wouldn’t wish to start all over again?”
― Nick Hornby, quote from How to Be Good
“An ideal world in my own home... I'm not yet sure why the prospect appalls me quite so much, but I do know somewhere in me that (he) is wrong, that a life without hatred is no life at all, that my children should be allowed to despise whom they like. Now there's a right worth fighting for...”
― Nick Hornby, quote from How to Be Good
“The difference between sex with David and sex with Stephen is like the difference between science and art. With Stephen it's all empathy and imagination and exploration and the shock of the new, and the outcome is... uncertain, if you know what I mean. I'm engaged by it, but I', mot necessarily sure what its all about. David, on the other hand, presses this button, then that one, and bingo! It's like operating a lift - just as romantic, but actually just as useful.”
― Nick Hornby, quote from How to Be Good
“I am a rationalist, and I don't believe in genies, or sudden personality changes. I wanted David's anger to vanish only after years and years in therapy.”
― Nick Hornby, quote from How to Be Good
Nick Hornby
Born place: in Redhill, Surrey, England, The United Kingdom
Born date April 17, 1957
See more on GoodReads
“The argument has long been made that we humans are by nature compassionate and empathic despite the occasional streak of meanness, but torrents of bad news throughout history have contradicted that claim, and little sound science has backed it. But try this thought experiment. Imagine the number of opportunities people around the world today might have to commit an antisocial act, from rape or murder to simple rudeness and dishonesty. Make that number the bottom of a fraction. Now for the top value you put the number of such antisocial acts that will actually occur today.
That ratio of potential to enacted meanness holds at close to zero any day of the year. And if for the top value you put the number of benevolent acts performed in a given day, the ratio of kindness to cruelty will always be positive. (The news, however, comes to us as though that ratio was reversed.)
Harvard's Jerome Kagan proposes this mental exercise to make a simple point about human nature: the sum total of goodness vastly outweighs that of meanness. 'Although humans inherit a biological bias that permits them to feel anger, jealousy, selfishness and envy, and to be rude, aggressive or violent,' Kagan notes, 'they inherit an even stronger biological bias for kindness, compassion, cooperation, love and nurture – especially toward those in need.' This inbuilt ethical sense, he adds, 'is a biological feature of our species.”
― Daniel Goleman, quote from Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships
“The sea was surging among the pilings like the blithe mindless forces of dissolution.”
― Ross Macdonald, quote from The Chill
“When I was in my teens, I made an appraisal of how comfortable my life could turn out when I became the age I am now. Because of a mechanical failure, the prediction was inexact.”
― Arthur Nersesian, quote from The Fuck-Up
“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things..”
― Henry David Thoreau, quote from Civil Disobedience and Other Essays
“But he - he hated pity as a cat hates water.”
― Richard Adams, quote from Shardik
Dina's Book
The Names
Peter Pan in Kensing...
The Book of Lies
Specimen Days
Truth and BeautyBookQuoters 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.
