Quotes from How to Be Good

“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

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Popular quotes

“Mécontent de tous et mécontent de moi, je voudrais bien me racheter et m’enorguiellir un peu dans le silence et la solitude de la nuit. Âmes de ceux que j’ai aimés, âmes de ceux que j’ai chantés, fortifiez-moi, éloignez de moi le mensonge et les vapeurs corruptices du monde; et vous, Seigneur mon Dieu! accordez-moi la grâce de produire quelques beaux vers qui me prouvent à moi même que je ne suis pas le dernier des hommes, que je ne suis pas inférieur à ceux que je méprise.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, quote from The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

“Every ending is arbitrary, because the end is where you write The end. A period, a dot of punctuation, a point of stasis. A pinprick in the paper: you could put your eye to it and see through, to the other side, to the beginning of something else. Or, as Tony says to her students, Time is not a solid, like wood, but a fluid, like water or the wind. It doesn't come neatly cut into even-sized length, into decades and centuries. Nevertheless, for our purposes we have to pretend it does. The end of any history is a lie in which we all agree to conspire.”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from The Robber Bride

“Suddenness," he says. " You do not prepare, you do not explain, you do not apologize. Suddenly, you go. And with you, you take all contemplation, all consideration of your own departure. All the suffering that would have come from knowing comes after you are gone, and you are not a part of it.”
― Téa Obreht, quote from The Tiger's Wife

“A small fireball hit him in the face. He again looked at his sister, smoke still curling out from her human nostrils. "What brat?"

"I said she'll want to return to her men as soon as she can."

"I know."

His sister smiled up at him. "And will you be ready for that, idiot?"

"It's Lord Idiot to you." Fearghus rested his head on his crossed forearms. "And yes, brat. I will be.”
― quote from Dragon Actually

“Ella se agarró a él, canción tras canción, mirándole fijamente a los ojos, como solía hacer antes conmigo. Así que quizá bebiera una copa de más mientras observaba la escena. Y tal vez aquel jarrón del vestíbulo se rompiera por mi culpa. Y puede que acabara mordiendo la almohada para silenciar mi llanto, para que Avery no me oyera.”
― Kiera Cass, quote from The Guard

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