It seems to me now that the plain state of being human is dramatic enough for anyone you don’t need to be a heroin addict or a performance poet to experience extremity. You just have to love someone.
Hard is trying to rebuild yourself, piece by piece, with no instruction book, and no clue as to where all the important bits are supposed to go.
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.
my friends don’t seem to be friends at all but people whose phone numbers I haven’t lost.
When your sad–like really sad–you only want to be with other people who are sad.
I read the fuck out of every book I can get my hands on.
contemporary poetry is a kind of Reykjavik, a place where accessibility and intelligence have been fighting a Cold War by proxy for the last half-century.
One thing about great art: it made you love people more, forgive them their petty transgressions. It worked in the way that religion was supposed to, if you thought about it.
It’s no good pretending that any relationship has a future if your record collections disagree violently or if your favorite films wouldn’t even speak to each other if they met at a party.
You wouldn’t believe that so much could change just because a relationship ended.
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.
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.
He’s a sweet man whose crime was that he didn’t love me quite enough, and because this wasn’t much of a crime I had to make up some bigger ones.
In other words, it’s one of those books you thrust on your partner with an incredulous cry of “This is me!
I would like my personal reading map to resemble a map of the British Empire circa 1900.
We are never allowed to forget that some books are badly written; we should remember that sometimes they’re badly read, too.
You’re not allowed to say anything about books because they’re books, and books are, you know, God.
I personally find that for domestic purposes, the Trivial Pursuit system works better than Dewey.
There isn’t so much to be afraid of, out there. I can remember thinking it was funny to find that out, on the last night of my life; I’d spent the rest of it being afraid of everything.
We spent all those years talking about stuff we had in common, and the last few months noticing all the ways we were different and it broke both of our hearts.
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.
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.
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
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.
Tucker, please put him down,” said Annie. “You’re frightening Jackson.””He’s not,” said Jackson. “It’s cool. I don’t like that guy anyway. Punch him, Dad.
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.
[H]ow was I supposed to get excited about the oppression of females if they couldn’t be trusted to stay upright during the final minutes of a desperately close promotion campaign?
What came first – the music or the misery? Did I listen to the music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to the music? Do all those records turn you into a melancholy person?
I love the relationship that anyone has with music … because there’s something in us that is beyond the reach of words, something that eludes and defies our best attempts to spit it out. … It’s the best part of us probably …
To me, making a tape is like writing a letter – there’s a lot of erasing and rethinking and starting again, and I wanted it to be a good one.
It’s music rage, which is like road rage, only more righteous. When you get road rage, a tiny part of you knows you’re being a jerk, but when you get music rage, you’re carrying out the will of God, and God wants these people dead
And mostly all I have to say about these songs is that I love them, and want to sing along to them, and force other people to listen to them, and get cross when these other people don’t like them as much as I do.
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…
All my life I wanted to go to bed with an American, and now I had, and I’m beginning to see why people don’t do it more often.
I’ve committed to nothing…and that’s just suicide…by tiny, tiny increments.
Experience, then, was something that enabled you to do nothing with a clear conscience. Experience was an overrated quality.
She regretted the explanation immediately, but that was because she always regretted everything
It’s brilliant, being depressed; you can behave as badly as you like.
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.
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.
I’m still pretty sick about what I’ve lost, but I only admit it to myself late at night, which is probably why I’m not the best sleeper.
Reciprocation was a pretty powerful stimulant to the imagination.
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
Knowing that you want to die makes you less scared.
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 human. That’s how humans spend their time, doing shitty things.
That’s the trouble with good writers. Only the bad ones make you want to do the human thing and look away.
Those days are gone, and good fucking riddance to them; unhappiness really meant something back then. Now it’s just a drag, like a cold or having no money. If you really wanted to mess me up, you should have got to me earlier.
(about organizing books in his home library, and putting a book in the “Arts and Lit non-fiction section)I personally find that for domestic purposes, the Trivial Pursuit system works better than Dewey.
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.
If I could have all of those things, I wouldn’t mind if I touched her or not.
That was his mother. When she wasn’t crying over the breakfast cereal, she was laughing about killing herself.
We get together with people because they’re the same or because they’re different, and in the end we split with them for exactly the same reasons.
He was a story at least, even if he never became anything else.
For the first time, but certainly not the last, I began to believe that Arsenal’s moods and fortunes somehow reflected my own
easily the best thing in her life at the moment was her secret.
Even thought our problems had driven us up there, it was as if they had somehow, like Daleks, been unable to climb the stairs.
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.
So there we have it. I get up in the morning determined to do something approximating to the right thing, and with in two hours find something to feel guilty about.
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.
Will wrestled with his conscience, grappled it to the ground and sat on it until he couldn’t hear a squeak out of it.
Defeated misery is what all sport is about, eventually, if you follow the story for long enough; all sportsmen know this.
Everything’s complicated, even those things that seem flat in their bleakness or sadness.