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"Over the last couple of years, the photos of me when I was a kid... well, they've started to give me a little pang or something - not unhappiness, exactly, but some kind of quiet, deep regret... I keep wanting to apologize to the little guy: "I'm sorry, I've let you down. I was the person who was supposed to look after you, but I blew it: I made wrong decisions at bad times, and I turned you into me."
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"Sudden acquaintance brings repentance."
"Why compare yourself to others? You never know what people have endured to get where they are."
"What matter most is not the sin. The moment of repentance: go and sin no more."
"But it seems she'd wanted children after all, because when she was told she'd been accidentally sterilized she could feel all the light leaking out of her."
"I wasn't able to be that person for you, and I did a terrible thing. I feel awful about it. But there was something wrong between us from the start, as if we'd done the buttons up wrong."
Explore more quotes by Nick Hornby
"Experience, then, was something that enabled you to do nothing with a clear conscience. Experience was an overrated quality."
"It's not a case of the glass being half full or half empty; more that we tipped a whole half-pint into an empty pint pot. I had to see how much was there, though, and now I know."
"Women who disapprove of men - and there's plenty to disapprove of - should remember how we started out, and how far we had to travel."
"One day, maybe not in the next few weeks, but certainly in the conceivable future, someone will be able to refer to me without using the word 'arse' somewhere in the sentence."
"Of course Tucker Crowe was in pain when he made [the record], but he couldn't just march into a recording studio and start howling. He'd have sounded mad and pathetic. He had to calm the rage, tame it and shape it so that it could be contained in the tight-fitting songs. Then he had to dress it up so that it sounded more like itself."
"Jess thought for a moment. 'You know those films where people fight up the top of the Empire State Building or up a mountain or whatever? And there's always that bit when the baddie slips off and the hero tries to save him, but, like, the sleeve of this jacket tears off and goes over and you hear him all the way down. Aaaaaaaaagh. That's what I want to do.' 'You want to watch me plunge to my doom.' 'I'd like to know that I've made the effort. I want to show people the torn sleeve."
"You may think that you don't want to read about the problems of being brought up Mennonite, but the great thing about books is that you'll read anything a good writer wants you to read."
"I'm never going to complain about receiving free early copies of books, because clearly there's nothing to complain about, but it does introduce a rogue element into one's otherwise carefully plotted reading schedule. ...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 temporarly deflected from your chosen path."
"I had to nurture those doubts as if they were tiny, sickly kittens, until eventually they became sturdy, healthy grievances, with their own cat doors, which allowed them to wander in and out of our conversation at will."
"You're not allowed to say anything about books because they're books, and books are, you know, God."
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