top of page
"You know that things aren't going well for you when you can't even tell people the simplest fact about your life, just because they'll presume you're asking them to feel sorry for you."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Psychology quotes

"A poor but confident man is as hard to find as a rich but shy man."

"We are not as important to most people as we are to ourselves. As a matter of fact, we are-to most people-not important at all."

"Instead of breaking or cherry-picking the rules, many just follow the inner rules, which have been instilled during their lifetime and have subtly permeated their thinking. They value rules, as it offers the ravishment of a securing, ceremonial rhythm in life and it prevents them from breaking free from their cocoon, all the more because freedom can be so scaring and exhausting. ['When forgetting the rules of the game']"

"It is a great mystery to me how the problems of others seem like simple arithmetic while my own appear as complicated as a calculus equation."

"Even if we have bad feelings about our past and it causes a sense of alienation, it belongs to our history. Its benchmarks are stored in the granary of our mind and crucial evaluations for the future cannot be made without consulting the archive of our memory. ['Not without the past']"

"If you babble enneagram, I am a five. If you boast myers-briggs, I am an introvert-intuition-thinking-perceiving."

"How then did it work out, this? How did one judge people, think of them? How did one add up this and that and conclude that it was liking one felt, or disliking?"

"Poor little place,' he murmured with a sigh.She heard him. He said the most melancholy things, but she noticed that directly he had said them he always seemed more cheerful than usual. All this phrase-making was a game, she thought, for if she had said half what he said, she would have blown her brains out by now."

"I feel like when I give trust that isn't earned, I receive hurt that isn't deserved."

"Boredom is a symptom of a conditioned and closed mind. If you are bored, you're doing yourself a tremendous disservice. Open your mind, break-free from your conditioned routine, and reignite the flames of excitement and discovery."
Explore more quotes by Nick Hornby

"We can't be as good as we'd want to, so the question then becomes, how do we cope with our own badness?"

"There were only seven years between the first and last Beatles albums. That's nothing, seven years, when you think of how their hairstyles changed and their music changed. Some bands now go seven years without hardly bothering to do anything."

"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, in the hope that you might be lucky, and the knife has actually been staunching the blood. You want to know the conventional medical wisdom? The conventional medical wisdom is that you keep the knife in. Really."

"The Beatles were bubblegum cards and Help at the Saturday morning cinema and toy plastic guitars and singing 'Yellow Submarine' at the top of my voice in the back row of the coach on school trips. They belong to me, not to me and Laura, or me and Charlie, or me and Alison Ashworth, and though they'll make me feel something, they won't make me feel anything bad."

"That was his mother. When she wasn't crying over the breakfast cereal, she was laughing about killing herself."

"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."

"But I want to see Clara, Charlie's friend, who's right up my street. I want to see her because I don't know where my street is; I don't even know which part of town it's in, which city, which country, so maybe she'll enable me to get my bearings."

"Sometimes you know you've got a chance with a girl because she wants to fight with you. If the world wasn't so messed up, it wouldn't be like that. If the world was normal, a girl being nice to you would be a good sign, but in the real world, it isn't."

"And another way of explaining it is to say that shit happens, and there's no space too small, too dark and airless and fucking hopeless, for people to crawl into."

"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."
bottom of page