Nick Hornby - High Fidelity (1995)

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I lost the plot for a while then. And I lost the subplot, the script, the soundtrack, the intermission, my popcorn, the credits, and the exit sign.

Nick Hornby
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.

Nick Hornby
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.

Nick Hornby
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.

Nick Hornby
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.

Nick Hornby
Why is failure the first thing I think of when I find myself in this sort of situation? Why can't I just enjoy myself? But if you have to ask the question, then you know you're lost: self-consciousness is a man's worst enemy. Already I'm wondering whether she's as aware of my erection as I am...

Nick Hornby
One day, maybe not in the next few weeks, but certainly in the conceivable future, someone will be able to refer to me without using the word 'arse' somewhere in the sentence.

Nick Hornby
You need as much ballast as possible to stop you from floating away; you need people around you, things going on, otherwise life is like some film where the money ran out, and there are no sets, or locations, or supporting actors, and it's just one bloke on his own staring into the camera with nothing to do and nobody to speak to, and who'd believe in this character then?

Nick Hornby
I'm very good at the past. It's the present I can't understand.

Nick Hornby
I've been thinking with my guts since I was fourteen years old, and, frankly, I think my guts have shit for brains.

Nick Hornby
It's brilliant, being depressed; you can behave as badly as you like.

Nick Hornby
I guess I should have forgotten about it ages ago, but forgetting isn't something I'm very good at.

Nick Hornby
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.

Nick Hornby
To me, making a tape is like writing a letter – there's a lot of erasing and rethinking and starting again, and I wanted it to be a good one.

Nick Hornby
Sex is about the only grown-up thing I know how to do; it's weird, then, that it's the only thing which can make me feel like a ten-year-old.

Nick Hornby
What came first — the music or the misery? Did I listen to the music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to the music? Do all those records turn you into a melancholy person?

Nick Hornby
Between the ages of fourteen and twenty-four, foreplay changes from being something that boys want to do and girls don't, to something that women want and men can't be bothered with.... The perfect match, if you ask me, is between the Cosmo woman and the fourteen-year old boy.

Nick Hornby
I don't even feel as if I'm the center of my own world, so how am I supposed to feel as though I'm the center of anyone else's?

Nick Hornby
Just because it's a relationship, and it's based on soppy stuff, it doesn't mean you can't make intellectual decisions about it. Sometimes you just have to, otherwise you'll never get anywhere. That's where I've been going wrong. I've been letting the weather and my stomach muscles and a great chord change in a Pretenders single make up my mind for me, and I want to do it for myself.

Nick Hornby
It's often the way that people who take their work seriously laugh at stupid jokes; it's as if they are under-humored and, as a consequence, suffer from premature laugh-ejaculation.

Nick Hornby
The chief attraction of the opposite sex for all of us, old and young, men and women: we need someone to save us from the sympathetic smiles in the Sunday-night cinema queue, someone who can stop us from falling down into the pit where the permanently single live with their mums and dads.

Nick Hornby
Unhappiness really meant something back then. Now it's just a drag, like a cold or having no money.

Nick Hornby
I never really recovered from the shock of discovering that women do what we do; they save their best pairs for the nights when they are going to sleep with somebody. When you live with a woman, these faded, shrunken tatty scraps suddenly appear on radiators all over the house; your lascivious schoolboy dreams of adulthood as a time when you are surrounded by exotic lingerie for ever and ever amen...those dreams crumble to dust.

Nick Hornby
I'd like my life to be like a Bruce Springsteen song. Just once. I know I'm not born to run, I know that Seven Sisters' Road is nothing like Thunder Road, but feelings can't be different, can they?

Nick Hornby
I can see that now. I can see everything once it's already happened — I'm very good at the past. It's the present I can't understand.

Nick Hornby
Over the last couple of years, the photos of me when I was a kid... well, they've started to give me a little pang or something - not unhappiness, exactly, but some kind of quiet, deep regret... I keep wanting to apologize to the little guy: "I'm sorry, I've let you down. I was the person who was supposed to look after you, but I blew it: I made wrong decisions at bad times, and I turned you into me.

Nick Hornby
One moment you're ticking along, cleaning the toilet bowl and expressing your feelings and doing all the other things that a modern chap is supposed to do; the next, you're manipulating and sulking and double-dealing and fibbing with the best of them. I can't work it out.

Nick Hornby
You can never do the right thing by someone if you've stopped sleeping with them. You can't see a way back, or through, or round, however hard you try.

Nick Hornby
You spend Christmas at somebody's house, you worry about their operations, you give them hugs and kisses and flowers, you see them in their dressing gown...and then bang, that's it. Gone forever. And sooner or later there will be another mum, another Christmas, more varicose veins. They're all the same. Only the addresses, and the colors of the dressing gown, change.

Nick Hornby
Barry, you're over thirty years old. You owe it to your mum and dad not to sing in a group called Sonic Death Monkey.

Nick Hornby