Browsing Quotes With Tag: life (97)
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He knew, of course he knew, that the song couldn’t last forever, that the evening couldn’t last forever, that he would soon be home tucked up in bed, that singing round the piano with a depressive hippy and her weirdo son wouldn’t kill him. He knew all that, but he didn’t feel it. He couldn’t do anything with these people after all, he could see that now. He’d been stupid to think there was anything here for him.
When he got home he put a Pet Shop Boys CD on, and watched Prisoner: Cell Block H with the sound down. He wanted to hear people who didn’t mean it, and he wanted to watch people he could laugh at. He got drunk, too; he filled a glass with ice and poured himself scotch after scotch. And as the drink began to take hold, he realized that people who meant it were much more likely to kill themselves than people who didn’t: he couldn’t recall having even the faintest urge to take his own life, and he found it hard to imagine that he ever would. 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. He wasn’t much bothered either way about anything, and that, he knew, would guarantee him a long and depression-free life. He’d made a big mistake thinking that good works were a way forward for him. They weren’t. they drove you mad. Fiona did good works and they had driven her mad: she was vulnerable, messed-up, and inadequate. Will had a system going here that was going to whizz him effortlessly to the grave. He didn’t want to fuck it up now.Speaker: Nick HornbySource: About a BoyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 10:19 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“It’s no wonder we’re all in such a mess, is it? We’re like Tom Hanks in Big. Little boys and girls trapped in adult bodies and force us to get on with it. And its much worse in real life, because it’s not just snogging and bunk beds, is it? There’s all this as well.”
Speaker: Nick HornbyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 9:19 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
“That’s how it goes. We all do that.”
“You all write songs about each other?”
“No, but…”
It would take too long to explain about Marco and Charlie, and how they wrote Sarah, and how Sarah and her ex, the one who wanted to be someone at the BBC, how they wrote me, and how Rosie the pain-in-the-arse simultaneous orgasm girl and I wrote Ian. It’s just that none of us had the wit or the talent to make them into songs. We made them into life, which is much messier, and more time-consuming, and leaves nothing for anybody to whistle.Speaker: Nick HornbyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 9:13 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
I remember what it is I like about sex: what I like about sex is that I can lose myself in it entirely. Sex, in fact, is the most absorbing activity I have discovered in adulthood. When I was a child I used to feel this way about all sorts of things—Legos, The Jungle Book, The Hardy Boys, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Saturday morning cartoons… I could forget where I was, the time of day, who I was with. Sex is the only thing I’ve found like that as a grown-up, give or take the odd film: books are no longer like that once you’re out of your teens, and I’ve certainly never found it in my work. All the horrible pre-sex self-consciousness drains out of me, and I forget where I am, the time of day…and yes, I forget who I’m with, for the time being. Sex is about the only grown-up thing I know how to do; it’s weird, then, that it’s the only thing that can make me feel like a ten-year-old.
Speaker: Nick HornbyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 9:13 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
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. If I lived in Bosnia, then not having a girlfriend wouldn’t seem like the most important thing in the world, but here in Crouch End it does. 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? 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.
Speaker: Nick HornbyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 9:09 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
When you get yourself in that place, the place I was in on New Year’s Eve, you think people who aren’t up on the roof are a million miles away, all the way across the ocean, but they’re not. There is no ocean. Pretty much all of them are on dry land, in touching distance. I’m not trying to say that’s how close happiness is, if we could only see it, or some bullshit like that. I’m not telling you that suicidal people aren’t so far away from people who can get by; I’m telling you that people who get by aren’t so far away from being suicidal. Maybe I shouldn’t find that as comforting as I do.
Speaker: Nick HornbyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 9:05 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Once you stop pretending that everything’s shitty and you can’t wait to get out of it, which is the story I’d been telling myself for a while, then it gets more painful, not less. Telling yourself life is shit is like an anesthetic, and when you stop taking the Advil, then you really can tell how much it hurts, and where, and it’s not like that kind of pain does anyone a whole lot of good.
Speaker: Nick HornbyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 9:02 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
What I owned up to was this: I had wanted to kill myself, not because I hated living, but because I loved it. And the truth of the matter is, I think, that a lot of people who think about killing themselves feel the same way – I think that’s how Maureen and Jess and Martin feel. They love life, but it’s all fucked up for them, and that’s why I met them, and that’s why we’re all still around. We were up on the roof because we couldn’t find a way back into life, and being shut out of it like that… It just fucking destroys you, man. So it’s like an act of despair, not an act of nihilism. It’s a mercy killing, not a murder.
Speaker: Nick HornbyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 9:01 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Oh, but I know what you need to keep yourself going. That probably sounds funny, considering why we were all in there in that coffee bar in the first place. But the fact is that so far I have kept myself going, even if I had to climb the stairs to the roof of Toppers’ House to do it. Sometimes you just need to give things a tiny little jiggle. You just need to think that perhaps someone might have helped themselves to their own earrings, and your part of the world looks like somewhere you could live in for a while.
Speaker: Nick HornbyPosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 9:00 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
One’s real life is so often the life that one does not lead.
Speaker: Oscar WildePosted: 20 Aug 2008 at 8:50 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Well-being and ill-being reside in action, and the goal of life is an activity, not a quality.
Speaker: AristotlePosted: 19 Aug 2008 at 6:30 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
He had been near death so many times that he had lost any fear of living.
Speaker: Isabelle Allende, "Zorro"Posted: 28 Jul 2008 at 10:16 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.
Speaker: Immanuel KantPosted: 08 Jul 2008 at 2:45 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Life is a long lesson in humility.
Speaker: James M. BarriePosted: 27 Mar 2008 at 10:04 AMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Life leaves me in a constant state of inelegance.
Speaker: GayPosted: 21 Nov 2007 at 11:22 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Live as if you will be here forever yet also live each day as if it were your last.
That way you will have no regrets for things left undone and you will not do things that you shouldn’t do.Speaker: GayPosted: 21 Nov 2007 at 11:21 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment! -
Your work is to discover your work and then with all your heart to give yourself to it.
Speaker: BuddhaPosted: 21 Nov 2007 at 7:13 PMComments: None... Be the first to comment!