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About a Boy QUOTES

About a Boy QUOTES

1 " There had been times when he knew, somewhere in him, that he would get used to it, whatever it was, because he had learnt that some hard things became softer after a very little while. "

― Nick Hornby , About a Boy

2 " You wouldn't believe that so much could change just because a relationship ended. "

― Nick Hornby , About a Boy

3 " You had to live in your own bubble. You couldn't force your way into someone else's, because then it wouldn't be a bubble any more. "

― Nick Hornby , About a Boy

4 " Because . . . most of us think that the point is something to do with work, or kids, or family, or whatever. But you don't have any of that. There's nothing between you and despair, and you don't seem a very desperate person.'
'Too stupid.'
'You're not stupid. So why don't you ever put your head in the oven?'
'I don't know. There's always a new Nirvana album to look forward to, or something happening in NYPD Blue to make you want to watch the next episode.'
'Exactly.'
'That's the point? NYPD Blue? Jesus.' It was worse than he thought.
'No, no. The point is you keep going. You want to. So all the things that make you want to are the point. I don't know if you even realize it, but on the quiet you don't think life's too bad. You love things. Telly. Music. Food. "

― Nick Hornby , About a Boy

5 " Marcus couldn't believe it. Dead. A dead duck. OK, he'd been trying to hit it on the head with a piece of sandwich, but he tried to do all sorts of things, and none of them had ever happened before. He'd tried to get the highest score on the Stargazer machine in the kabab shop on Hornsey road - nothing. He'd tried to read Nicky's thoughts by staring at the back of his head every maths lesson for a week - nothing. It really annoyed him that the only thing he'd ever achieved through trying was something he hadn't really wanted to do that much in the first place. And anyway, since when did hitting a bird with a sandwich ever kill it? People spend half their lives throwing things at the ducks in Regent's Park. How come he managed to pick a duck that pathetic? "

― Nick Hornby , About a Boy

6 " There were about seventy-nine squillion people in the world, and if you were very lucky, you would end up being loved by fifteen or twenty of them. "

― Nick Hornby , About a Boy

7 " It struck him that how you spent Christmas was a message to the world about where you were in life, some indication of how deep a hole you had managed to burrow for yourself "

― Nick Hornby , About a Boy

8 " he was home on his own and listening to the sort of music he needed to listen to when he felt like this, music that seemed to find the sore spot in him and press up hard against it... "

― Nick Hornby , About a Boy

9 " All that night he thought like boomerangs fly: an idea would shoot way off into the distance, all the way to a caravan in Hollywood and, for a moment, when he had got as far away from school and reality as it was possible to go, he was reasonably happy; then it would begin the return journey, thump him on the head, and leave him in exactly the place he had started from. And all the time it got nearer and nearer to the morning. "

― Nick Hornby , About a Boy

10 " Reciprocation was a pretty powerful stimulant to the imagination. "

― Nick Hornby , About a Boy

11 " What good were real feelings anyway? "

― Nick Hornby , About a Boy

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

― Nick Hornby , About a Boy

13 " Will wrestled with his conscience, grappled it to the ground and sat on it until he couldn't hear a squeak out of it. "

― Nick Hornby , About a Boy

14 " This thing about looking for someone less different... It only really worked, he realized, if you were convinced that being you wasn't so bad in the first place. "

― Nick Hornby , About a Boy

15 " Loving people, and allowing yourself to be loved, was only worth the risk if the odds were in your favor, but they quite clearly weren't. There were about seventy-nine squillion people in the world, and if you were very lucky, you would end up being loved by fifteen or twenty of them. So how smart did you have to be to work out that it just wasn't worth the risk? "

― Nick Hornby , About a Boy

16 " The point is you keep going. You want to. So all the things that make you want to are the point. "

― Nick Hornby , About a Boy

17 " [...] falling in love with someone beautiful and intelligent and the rest of it, then feeling like a blank twit put you at something of a disadvantage. "

― Nick Hornby , About a Boy

18 " No man is an island... "

― Nick Hornby , About a Boy

19 " But all three of them had had to lose things in order to gain other things. Will had lost his shell and his cool and his distance, and he felt scared and vulnerable, but he got to be with Rachel; and Fiona had lost a big chunk of Marcus, and she got to stay away from the casualty ward; and Marcus had lost himself, and got to walk home from school with his shoes on. "

― Nick Hornby , About a Boy

20 " His way of coping with the days was to think of activities as units of time, each unit consisting of about thirty minutes. Whole hours, he found, were more intimidating, and most things one could do in a day took half an hour. Reading the paper, having a bath, tidying the flat, watching Home and Away and Countdown, doing a quick crossword on the toilet, eating breakfast and lunch, going to the local shops… That was nine units of a twenty-unit day (the evenings didn’t count) filled by just the basic necessities. In fact, he had reached a stage where he wondered how his friends could juggle life and a job. Life took up so much time, so how could one work and, say, take a bath on the same day? He suspected that one or two people he knew were making some pretty unsavoury short cuts. "

― Nick Hornby , About a Boy