danielp > danielp's Quotes

“I'm very good at the past. It's the present I can't understand.”
― Nick Hornby, High Fidelity

“Maybe we all live life at too high a pitch, those of us who absorb emotional things all day, and as mere consequence we can never feel merely content: we have to be unhappy, or ecstatically, head-over-heels happy, and those states are difficult to achieve within a stable, solid relationship.”
― Nick Hornby, High Fidelity

“…I've had a bad week."
What's happened?"
Nothing's happened. I've had a bad week in my head, is all.”
― Nick Hornby, High Fidelity

“my friends don't seem to be friends at all but people whose phone numbers I haven't lost.”
― Nick Hornby, High Fidelity

“(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, High Fidelity

“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, High Fidelity

“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”
― Nick Hornby, High Fidelity

“It's only just beginning to occur to me that it's important to have something going on somewhere, at work or at home, otherwise you're just clinging on. [...] You need as much ballast as possible to stop you 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 guy on his own staring into the camera with nothing to do and nobody to speak to, and who'd believe in this character then? I've got to get more stuff, more clutter, more detail in here, because at the moment I'm in danger of falling off the edge.”
― Nick Hornby, High Fidelity

“What went wrong? Nothing and everything.”
― Nick Hornby, High Fidelity

“What really matters is what you like, not what you are like”
― Nick Hornby, High Fidelity

“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, High Fidelity

“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.”
― Nick Hornby, High Fidelity