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I had forgotten that Jess felt about long words the way that racists feel about black people: She hated them, and wanted to send them back from where they came from.

Nick Hornby

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Nick Hornby
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: April 17
Essayist
Film Producer
Lyricist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Songwriter
Writer
Nicholas Peter John Hornby
Feel
Hated
Feels
Forgotten
Long
Came
Way
Words
People
Black
Jess
Felt
Racists
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Racist
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More quotes by Nick Hornby

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Do you ever do that thing where you lie in bed and you can't sleep so you end up writing out recent conversation you've had? So they look like a play?' Well you should. It's fun. I keep them. Look through them, sometimes.
Nick Hornby
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He would read up on parenting, if he thought it would help, but his errors always seemed too basic for the manuals. Always tell your kids they have siblings... He couldn't imagine any child-raising guru taking the trouble to write that down. Maybe there was a gap in the market.
Nick Hornby
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Where's the superficial? I was, and therefore am, dim, gloomy, a drag, unfashionable, unfanciable, and awkward. This doesn't seem like superficial to me. These aren't flesh wounds. These are life-threatening thrusts into the internal organs.
Nick Hornby
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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
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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
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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
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Several months later, and I have finally read one of the three (books), even though I wanted to read all three of them immediately. What happened in between? Other books, is what happened. Other books, other moods, other obligations, other appetites, other reading journeys.
Nick Hornby
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You just have to smile and take it, otherwise it would drive you mad.
Nick Hornby
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You don't ask people with knives in their stomachs what would make them happy happiness is no longer the point. It's all about survival it's all about whether you pull the knife out and bleed to death or keep it in.
Nick Hornby
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The point is you keep going. You want to. So all the things that make you want to are the point.
Nick Hornby
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You'll remember someone who broke your heart, and you'll think to yourself, 'Oh yes, I remember how that feels.' But you can't.
Nick Hornby
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It's no good looking to writers for definitions of what constitutes proper writing, because you will drive yourself crazy, and you won't find anything that you can build into a coherent whole.
Nick Hornby
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One could argue that most of the trouble in the world is caused by introspection.
Nick Hornby
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(about organizing books in his home library, and putting a book in the Arts and Lit non-fiction section) I personally find that for domestic purposes, the Trivial Pursuit system works better than Dewey.
Nick Hornby
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I really don't want to be boring, and so many books are so boring!
Nick Hornby
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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.
Nick Hornby
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Phone calls like ours only happen when you've spent several years hurting and being hurt, until every work you utter or hear becomes coded and loaded, as complicated and full of subtext as a bleak and brilliant play.
Nick Hornby
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We can't be as good as we'd want to, so the question then becomes, how do we cope with our own badness?
Nick Hornby
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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
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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