Joni Mitchell's someone who has tried to make sense of her own world, sometimes painfully, through song. Nick Hornby More Quotes by Nick Hornby More Quotes From Nick Hornby 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. Nick Hornby askingsorrypeople 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 eyewaterblood But what else can we do when we're so weak? We invest hours each day, months each year, years each lifetime in something over which we have no control; it is any wonder then, that we are reduced to creating ingenious but bizarre liturgies designed to give us the illusion that we are powerful after all, just as every other primitive community has done when faced with a deep and apparently impenetrable mystery? Nick Hornby creatingpowerfulyears Anyway, who lives a rich and beautiful life that I know? It's no longer possible, surely, for anyone who works for a living, or lives in a city, or shops in a supermarket, or watches TV, or reads a newspaper, or drives a car, or eats frozen pizzas. A nice life, possibly, with a huge slice of luck and a little spare cash. And maybe even a good life if... Well, let's not go into all that. But rich and beautiful lives seem to be a discontinued line. Nick Hornby good-lifenicebeautiful So now what? What happens when words fail us? Nick Hornby failinghappens I was still owed an explanation, I thought, but so what? What good was it going to do me? It wouldn't have made me any happier. It was like scratching when you have chicken pox. You think it's going to help, but the itch moves over, and then moves over again. My itch suddenly felt miles away, and I couldn't have reached it with the longest arms in the world. Realizing that made me scared that I was going to be itchy forever, and I didn't want that. Nick Hornby forevermovingthinking 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 characterbelievepeople (About Love)The most important thing in life, and you can't tell whether people have it or not. Surely this is wrong? Surely people who are happy should look happy, at all times, no matter how much money they have or how uncomfortable their shoes are or how little their child is sleeping; and people who are doing OK but have still not found their soul-mate should look, I don't know, anxious, like Billy Crystal in When Harry Met Sally; and people who are desperate should wear something, a yellow ribbon maybe, which would allow them to be identified by similar desperate people. Nick Hornby things-in-lifesleepchildren I don't think you can call it stalking when it's just phone calls and letters and emails and knocking on the door. Nick Hornby phonesdoorsthinking 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. Nick Hornby treat-yourselftreats Asking the head I have now to explain its own thinking is as pointless as dialing your own telephone number on your own telephone: Either way, you get an engaged signal. Or your own answer message, if you have that kind of phone system. Nick Hornby phonesnumbersthinking The artistic temperament is particularly unhelpful if it is just that, with no end product. Nick Hornby temperamentartisticends And we'd had this stupid scene on the street, and even that was kind of cool, because sometimes it's moments like that, real complicated moments, absorbing moments, that make you realize that even hard times have things in them that make you feel alive. Nick Hornby hard-timesrealstupid 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. Nick Hornby regretoppositesyears I'm human. That's how humans spend their time, doing shitty things. Nick Hornby humans It's not what you like but what you are like that's important. Nick Hornby important 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. Nick Hornby catreadingbook 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 girlmenboys Maybe the best thing to do with favorite books is to leave them be: to achieve such exalted position means that they entered your life at exactly the right time, in precisely the right place, and those conditions can never be recreated. Nick Hornby achievemeanbook Love and charity share the same root word (caritas). How is that possible, when everything in our recent history suggest they cannot coexist, that they are antiethical, that if you put the two of them together in a sack they would bite and scratch and scream, until one of them is torn apart? Nick Hornby rootstogethertwo
