Nick Hornby - About a Boy (1998)

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When it came down to it, he just wasn't that engaged. You had to be engaged to be a vegetarian; you had to be engaged to sing "Both Sides Now" with your eyes closed; when it came down to it, you had to be engaged to be a mother.

Nick Hornby
The point is you keep going. You want to. So all the things that make you want to are the point.

Nick Hornby
It struck him that how you spent Christmas was a message to the world about where you were in life, some indication of how deep a hole you had managed to burrow for yourself

Nick Hornby
Each day was a bad day, but he survived by kidding himself that each day was somehow unconnected to the day before.

Nick Hornby
Single mothers — bright, attractive, available women, thousands of them all over London — they were the best invention Will had ever heard of.

Nick Hornby
But all three of them had had to lose things in order to gain other things. Will had lost his shell and his cool and his distance, and he felt scared and vulnerable, but he got to be with Rachel; and Fiona had lost a big chunk of Marcus, and she got to stay away from the casualty ward; and Marcus had lost himself, and got to walk home from school with his shoes on.

Nick Hornby
There had been times when he knew, somewhere in him, that he would get used to it, whatever it was, because he had learnt that some hard things became softer after a very little while.

Nick Hornby
And it isn't that I'm so unhappy I don't want to live anymore. That's not what it feels like. It feels more like I'm tired and bored and the party's gone on too long and I want to go home. I feel flat and there doesn't seem to be anything to look forward to, so I'd rather call it a day.

Nick Hornby
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?

Nick Hornby
You wouldn't believe that so much could change just because a relationship ended.

Nick Hornby
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?

Nick Hornby
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.

Nick Hornby
Reciprocation was a pretty powerful stimulant to the imagination.

Nick Hornby
You had to live in your own bubble. You couldn't force your way into someone else's, because then it wouldn't be a bubble any more.

Nick Hornby
[...] falling in love with someone beautiful and intelligent and the rest of it, then feeling like a blank twit put you at something of a disadvantage.

Nick Hornby
That was his mother. When she wasn't crying over the breakfast cereal, she was laughing about killing herself.

Nick Hornby