“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
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“You see, each country has a colour, a smell, and also a contagious sickness. In my country the sickness is complacency. In France it's arrogance, and in the United States it's ignorance."
"What about Rwanda?"
"Easy power and impunity. Here, there's total disorder. To someone who has a little money or powere, everything that seems forbidden elsewhere looks permissible and possible. All it takes is to dare it. Someone who's simply a liar in my country can be a fraud artist here, and the fraud artist gets to be a big-time thief. Chaos and most of all poverty give him powers he wouldn't have elsewhere.”
― Gil Courtemanche, quote from A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali
“It was the excitement, the richness of the whole experience, the mixture of pleasure and danger and freedom and the sun. You know, when we came back here, for a long while I still went on living in Euphoria inside my head. Outwardly I returned to my old routine. I got up in the morning, put on a tweed suit, read the Guardian over breakfast, walked into the University, gave the same old tutorials on the same old texts... and all the while I was leading a completely different life inside my head. Inside my head, I had decided not to come back to England, so I was waking up in Plotinus, sitting in the sun in my happi-coat, looking out over the Bay, putting on Levis and a sports shirt, reading the Euphoric Times over breakfast, and wondering what would happen today, would there be a protest, a demonstration, would my class have to fight their way through teargas and picket lines or should we meet off-campus in somebody's apartment, sitting on the floor surrounded by posters and leaflets and paperbacks about encounter groups and avant garde theatre and Viet Nam.”
― David Lodge, quote from Small World
“One of the reasons that youth and their elders don’t understand one another is that they live in “ different worlds”: the youth are striving to deal with one another in terms of their insides, the elders have long since lost the magic of the chumship. Especially today, the exterior or public aspect of the adult world, its jobs and rewards, no longer seem meaningful or vital to the college youth; the youth try to prolong the adolescent art of communicating on the basis of internal feelings; they may even try to break through the carapace of their own parents, try to get the insides to come out.”
― Ernest Becker, quote from The Birth and Death of Meaning: An Interdisciplinary Perspective on the Problem of Man
“All will be well, if we do what is right”
― Dean Koontz, quote from Breathless
“You know," Elijah raised a hand to shake a finger at her, "you have an attitude problem."
"I certainly do. Your attitude is a huge problem for me.”
― Jacquelyn Frank, quote from Elijah
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