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"That is another chamber of my heart that shows no electrical activity - the chamber that used to flicker into life when I saw a film that moved me, or read a book that inspired me, or listened to music that made me want to cry. I closed that chamber myself, for all the usual reasons. And now I seem to have made a pact with some philistine devil: if I don't attempt to re-open it, I will be allowed just enough energy and optimism to get through a working day without wanting to hang myself."
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"I was alone with myself. And disgusting as I was it was better than being with somebody else, anybody else, all of them out there doing their pitiful little tricks and handsprings."
"All the things that people do in order to show that they don't need anybody... meanwhile, all they really want to do is say, "Please keep me." We all want to be kept. The problem is we are too afraid to let anyone know about it. What are these fragile things in our hearts that have so much fear of being broken?"
"And then something invisible snapped insider her, and that which had come together commenced to fall apart."
"Then the man smiled, and his smile was a shock, for it was all on one side, going up in the right cheek and down in the left.There was nothing, rationally speaking, to scare anyone about this. Many people have this nervous trick of a crooked smile, and in many it is even attractive. But in all Syme's circumstances, with the dark dawn and the deadly errand and the loneliness on the great dripping stones, there was something unnerving in it. There was the silent river and the silent man, a man of even classic face. And there was the last nightmare touch that his smile suddenly went wrong."
"There's still a little girl inside every grown woman who would love to be able to fall into the arms of her mother and cry her eyes out every now and then."
"On the rebound one passes into tears and pathos. Maudlin tears. I almost prefer the moments of agony. These are at least clean and honest. But the bath of self-pity, the wallow, the loathsome sticky-sweet pleasure of indulging it--that disgusts me."
"A heart in love is a thriller book of many stories."
"She paused and unexpectedly stroked her fingers down the feathers of his neck.He froze. She couldn't know how intimate that seemed, or how sensitive he was to her touch even through the sleek covering of eagle feathers. Pleasure at being petted ran down his spine.He should say something or step away. He did neither. Instead, ever so slightly, he leaned into her touch.It was wrong of him, but his wrong button seemed to be broken, and he didn't care."
Explore more quotes by Nick Hornby
"A middle-aged woman who looked like someone's cleaning lady, a shrieking adolescent lunatic and a talkshow host with an orange face... It didn't add up. Suicide wasn't invented for people like this. It was invented for people like Virginia Woolf and Nick Drake. And Me. Suicide was supposed to be cool."
"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."
"I fell in love with football as I was later to fall in love with women: suddenly, inexplicably, uncritically, giving no thought to the pain or disruption it would bring with it."
"When she removed my hand from her chest for the one hundred thousandth time. Attack and defense, invasion and repulsion... it was as if breasts were little pieces of property that had been unlawfully annexed by the opposite sex - they were rightfully ours and we wanted them back."
"Bad thing upon bad thing upon bad thing until you can't take anymore, and then it's off to the nearest multistory car park in the family hatchback with a length of rubber tubing. Surely that's fair enough? Surely the coroner's report should read, "He took his own life after sober and careful contemplation of the fucking shambles it had become."
"A while back, when Dick and Barry and I agreed that what really matters is what you like, not what you are like, Barry proposed the idea of a questionnaire for prospective partners."
"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."
"I used to think--and given the way we ended up, maybe I still do--that all relationships need the kind of violent shove that a crush brings, just to get you started and to push you over the humps. And then, when the energy from that shove has gone and you come to something approaching a halt, you have to look around and see what you've got. It could be something completely different, it could be something roughly the same, but gentler and calmer, or it could be nothing at all."
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