Quote

Self-pity is an ignoble emotion, but we all feel it, and the orthodox critical line that it represents some kind of artistic flaw is dubious, a form of emotional correctness.

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
Form
Flaws
Self
Artistic
Feel
Pity
Ignoble
Feels
Critical
Flaw
Kind
Line
Dubious
Emotional
Correctness
Emotion
Represents
Lines
Orthodox

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It takes a child to say the unsayable.
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The trouble with history is that there are too many people involved
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We're here for such a short amount of time. Why do we spend any of it building sandcastles?
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Clockers asks--almost in passing, and there's a lot more to it than this--a pretty interesting question: if you choose to work for the minimum wage when everyone around you is pocketing thousands from drug deals, then what does that do to you, to your head and to your heart? (Hornby's thoughts after reading Clockers by Richard Price)
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But then, that was the trouble with relationships generally. They had their own temperature and there was no thermostat.
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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.
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I would like my personal reading map to resemble a map of the British Empire circa 1900.
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I’m not the smartest guy in the world, but I’m certainly not the dumbest. I mean, I’ve read books like The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Love in the Time of Cholera, and I think I’ve understood them. They’re about girls, right? Just kidding. But I have to say my all-time favorite book is Johnny Cash’s autobiography Cash by Johnny C
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People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands - literally thousands - of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss.
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One could argue that most of the trouble in the world is caused by introspection.
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When even the scrupulously detached BBC is exhorting us to talk to God, you know something is going on.
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Sometimes we have to be judged by our one-offs.
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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.
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Being a reader is sort of like being president, except reading involves fewer state dinners, usually. You have this agenda you want to get through, but you get distracted by life events, e.g., books arriving in the mail/World War III, and you are temporarily deflected from your chosen path.
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Complaining about boring football is a little like complaining about the sad ending of King Lear: it misses the point somehow.
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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.
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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.
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Definitely avoid going out with ugly girls who say they want to be models. Not because they're ugly, but because they're mad.
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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.
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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.
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