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It is a strange paradox that while the grief of football fans (and it is real grief) is private - we each have an individual relationship with our clubs, and I think that we are secretly convinced that none of the other fans understands quite why we have been harder hit than anyone else - we are forced to mourn in public, surrounded by people whose hurt is expressed in forms different from our own.
Nick Hornby
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Even bad times have good things in them to make you feel alive.
Nick Hornby
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You have to work at relationships. You can't just walk out on them every time something goes wrong.
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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?
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You wouldn't believe that so much could change just because a relationship ended.
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I had to nurture those doubts as if they were tiny, sickly kittens, until eventually they became sturdy, healthy grievances, with their own cat doors, which allowed them to wander in and out of our conversation at will.
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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
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So this is supposed to be about the how, and when, and why, and what of reading — about the way that, when reading is going well, one book leads to another and to another, a paper trail of theme and meaning; and how, when it's going badly, when books don't stick or take, when your mood and the mood of the book are fighting like cats, you'd rather do anything but attempt the next paragraph, or reread the last one for the tenth time.
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He loved Nirvana, but at his age they were kind of a guilty pleasure. All that rage and pain and self-hatred! Will got a bit...fed up sometimes, but he couldn't pretend it was anything stronger than that. So now he used loud angry rock music as a replacement for real feelings, rather than as an expression of them, and he didn't even mind very much. What good were real feelings anyway?
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Most people have a rope that ties them to someone, and that rope can be short or it can be long. (Be long. Belong. Get it?) You don't know how long, though. It's not your choice.
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These feelings were exactly what he had been so afraid of, and this was why he had been so sure that falling in love was rubbish, and, surprise surprise, it was rubbish, and... and it was too late.
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Then I lost it. Kinda lost it all, you know. Faith, dignity, about fifteen pounds.
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A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do and takes ages longer than it might seem. You've got to kick off with a killer, to grab the attention. Then you've got to take it up a notch, or cool it off a notch.... Oh, there are a lot of rules.
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Books are, let's face it, better than everything else. If we played Cultural Fantasy Boxing League, and made books go fifteen rounds in the ring against the best that any other art form had to offer, then books would win pretty much every time.
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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.
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And another way of explaining it is that shit happens, and there's no space too small, too dark and airless and fucking hopeless, for people to crawl into.
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It's no good pretending that any relationship has a future if your record collections disagree violently or if your favorite films wouldn't even speak to each other if they met at a party.
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We were little animals, which is not to imply that by the end of the week we were tearing our tank tops off; just that, metaphorically speaking, we had begun to sniff each other's bottoms, and we did not find the odor entirely repellent.
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One could argue that most of the trouble in the world is caused by introspection.
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I couldn't get the mood back; it was as if one of the kids had woken up just as Cindy and I were starting to make love. I hadn't changed my mind, and I still knew that I'd have to do it sometime. It's just that I knew I wasn't going to be able to do it in the next five minutes.
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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.
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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.
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The natural state of the football fan is bitter disappointment, no matter what the score.
Nick Hornby
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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.
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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
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Quote of the day
No longer shall I paint interiors with men reading and women knitting. I will paint living people who breathe and feel and suffer and love.
Edvard Munch
Nick Hornby
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Born:
April 17, 1957
(age 67)
Bio:
Nicholas Peter John "Nick" Hornby is an English novelist, essayist, lyricist, and screenwriter. He is best known for his novels High Fidelity and About a Boy.
Known for:
High Fidelity (1995)
Funny Girl (2014)
Fever Pitch (1992)
A Long Way Down (2005)
About a Boy (1998)
Most used words:
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life
books
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