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.
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.
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?
Sarcasm and compassion are two of the qualities that make life on Earth tolerable.
Hard is trying to rebuild yourself, piece by piece, with no instruction book, and no clue as to where all the important bits are supposed to go.
It's brilliant, being depressed; you can behave as badly as you like.
Sentimental music has this great way of taking you back somewhere at the same time that it takes you forward, so you feel nostagic and hopeful all at the same time.
Everyone knows how to talk, and no one knows what to say.
I've committed to nothing...and that's just suicide...by tiny, tiny increments.
I'm very good at the past. It's the present I can't understand.
I read the fuck out of every book I can get my hands on.
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.
If you really wanted to mess me up, you should have got to me earlier.
Telling me I can do anything I want is like pulling the plug out of the bath and then telling the water it can go anywhere it wants. Try it, and see what happens.
We spent all those years talking about stuff we had in common, and the last few months noticing all the ways we were different and it broke both of our hearts.
…I've had a bad week." What's happened?" Nothing's happened. I've had a bad week in my head, is all.
I've been thinking with my guts since I was fourteen years old, and frankly speaking, between you and me, I have come to the conclusion that my guts have shit for brains.
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.
Even bad times have good things in them to make you feel alive.
When you're unhappy, I guess everything in the world - reading, eating, sleeping - has something buried somewhere inside it that just makes you unhappier.
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.
It's a mystery of human chemistry and I don't understand it, some people, as far as their senses are concerned, just feel like home.
It's not what you like but what you are like that's important.
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.
For alarmingly large chunks of an average day, I am a moron.
One could argue that most of the trouble in the world is caused by introspection.
 You don't know how long, though. It's not your choice. ){kind=small}
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.
It's no wonder we're all such a mess, is it? We're like Tom Hanks in Big. Little boys and girls trapped in adult bodies and forced to get on with it.
I'm a good person. In most ways. But I'm beginning to think that being a good person in most ways doesn't count for anything very much, if you're a bad person in one way.
The truth will set you free. Either that or it'll get you a punch in the nose.
And another way of explaining it is to say that shit happens, and there's no space too small, too dark and airless and fucking hopeless, for people to crawl into.
I don't believe in Heaven or anything. But I want to be the kind of person that qualifies for entry anyway.
My friends don't seem to be friends at all but people whose phone numbers I haven't lost.
When your sad--like really sad--you only want to be with other people who are sad.
Human beings are millions of things in one day.
I fell in love with football as I was later to fall in love with women: suddenly, inexplicably, uncritically, giving no thought to the pain or disruption it would bring with it.
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
This thing about looking for someone less different... It only really worked, he realized, if you were convinced that being you wasn't so bad in the first place.
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.
In other words, it's one of those books you thrust on your partner with an incredulous cry of "This is me!
For the best part of 40 years she had genuinely believed that not doing things would somehow prevent regret, when, of course, the exact opposite was true.
The truth about life was that nothing ever ended until you died, and even then you just left a whole bunch of unresolved narratives behind you.
You know that things aren't going well for you when you can't even tell people the simplest fact about your life, just because they'll presume you're asking them to feel sorry for you.
I miss him like one might miss a scar, or wooden leg, something disfiguring but characteristic.
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?
I hate time. It never does what you want it to.
There are many differences between a baby and an I-Pod. And one of the biggest is, no ones going to mug you for your baby.
He's at the chocolate teapot end of the competency scale.
I'm human. That's how humans spend their time, doing shitty things.
So it's not about what you do. It can't be, can it? It has to be about how you are, how you love, how you treat yourself and those around you, and that's where I get eaten up.
She thought I was...soulful, by which I think she means that I don't say much and I always look vaguely pissed off.
The point is you keep going. You want to. So all the things that make you want to are the point.
I suddenly had a little epiphany: all the books we own, both read and unread, are the fullest expression of self we have at our disposal.
It's just that none of us had the wit or talent to make them into songs. We made them into life, which much messier, and more time consuming, and leaves nothing for anybody to whistle.
There's nothing you can't fuck up if you try hard enough.
I would like my personal reading map to resemble a map of the British Empire circa 1900.
We get together with people because they're the same or because they're different, and in the end we split with them for exactly the same reasons.
I love the detail about the workings of the human heart and mind that only fiction can provide - film can't get in close enough.
One has so many more opinions about what has gone wrong than about what is perfect.
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.
The outward manifestations of an inner combustion are never very directed.
Books are, let's face it, better than everything else.
What went wrong? Nothing and everything.
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
You wouldn't believe that so much could change just because a relationship ended.
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.
What really matters is what you like, not what you are like
So now what? What happens when words fail us?
There isn't so much to be afraid of, out there. I can remember thinking it was funny to find that out, on the last night of my life; I'd spent the rest of it being afraid of everything.
It's just that romance, with its dips and turns and glooms and highs, its swoops and swoons and blues, is a natural metaphor for music itself
Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.
![[...] 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.](https://quotes.thefamouspeople.com/images/quotes/nick-hornby-39527.jpg)
[...] 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.
...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.
But then, that was the trouble with relationships generally. They had their own temperature and there was no thermostat.
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.
When you get older, it feels like happy memories and sad memories are pretty much the same thing. It is all just emotion in the end. And any of it can make you weep.
