High Fidelity

Nick Hornby's novel for the music-obsessed. Turned into a movie, obviously.


"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."

"I stung, and I blushed, and I suddenly forgot how to walk without being aware of every single part of my body."

"It would be nice to think that as I've got older times have changed, relationships have become more sophisticated, females less cruel, skins thicker, reactions sharper, instincts more developed. But there still seems to be an element of that evening in everything that has happened to me since; all my other romantic stories seem to be a scrambled version of that first one. Of course, I have never had to take that long walk again, and my ears have no burned with quite the same fury, and I have never had to count the packs of cheap cigarettes in order to avoid mocking eyes and floods of tears...not really, not actually, not as such. It just feels that way, sometimes."
"Between the ages of fourteen and twenty-four, foreplay changes from something that boys want to do and girls don't, to something that women want and men can't be bothered with."

"Maybe it was best not to think about it too hard; I didn't want to feel sorry for anybody else except me."

"I'm not too sure why I wanted to fuck it all up for them, and for everyone who needed them to go out together. You know when you see T-shirts piled up in a clothes shop, beautifully folded and color-coded, and you buy one? It never looks the same when you take it home. It only looked good in the shop, and you realize too late, because it had its mates around it. Well, it was kind of like that."

"At seventeen, we were becoming as embittered and as unromantic as our parents."

"Everything happened so fast. I had kind of hoped that my adulthood would be long and meaty and instructive, but it all took place in those two years; sometimes it seems as though everything and everyone that have happened to me since were just minor distractions."

"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?"

"The unhappiest people I know, romantically speaking, are the ones who like pop music the most; and I don't know whether pop music has caused this unhappiness, but I do know that they've been listening to the sad songs longer than they've been living the unhappy lives."

"My genius, if I can call it that, is to combine a whole load of averageness into one compact frame."

"Only people of a certain disposition are frightened of being alone for the rest of their lives at twenty-six; we were of that disposition."

"I'm glad I learned to stay home and sulk."

"You run the risk of losing anyone who is worth spending time with, unless you are so paranoid about loss that you choose someone unlosable, somebody who could not possibly appeal to anybody else at all. If you've going to go in for this stuff at all, you have to live with the possibility that it won't work out, that somebody called Marco, say, or in this case, Tom, is going to come along and upset you. But I didn't see it like that at the time. All I saw then was that I'd moved down a division and that it still hadn't worked out, and this seemed a cause for a great deal of misery and self-pity."

"'I can't deal with me, let alone you.'"

"Tuesday night I reorganize my record collection; I often do this at periods of emotional stress. There are some people who would find this a pretty dull way to spend an evening, but I'm not one of them. This is my life, and it's nice to be able to wade in it, immerse your arms in it, touch it."

"I always think that women are going to save me, lead me through to a better life, that they can change and redeem me."

"Fuck. I hate all this stuff. How old do you have to get before it stops?"

"I accept and understand that you can't be good at everything, and I am tragically unskilled in some very important areas. But sex is different; knowing that a successor is better in bed is impossible to take, and I don't know why."

"It's brilliant, being depressed; you can behave as badly as you like."

"I can see everything once it's already happened--I'm very good at the past. It's the present I can't understand."

"'Because I'd never stuck at anything before, and I'd made a promise to myself when we started seeing each other that I'd make it through at least one bad patch, just to see what happened. So I did.'"

"You know the worst thing about being rejected? The lack of control. If I could only control the when and how of being dumped by somebody, then it wouldn't seem as bad. But then, of course, it wouldn't be rejection, would it? It would be by mutual consent."

"...at some point or other along the way I remembered what it is I like about sex: what I like about sex is that I can lose myself in it entirely. Sex, in fact, is the most absorbing activity I have discovered in adulthood."

"Sex is about the only grown-up thing I know how to do; it's weird, then, that it's the only thing that can make me feel like a ten-year-old."

"Before we slept together, there was at least some pretense that it was something we both wanted to do, that it was the healthy, strong beginning of an exciting new relationship. Now all the pretense seems to have gone, and we're left to face the fact that we're sitting here because we don't know anybody else we could be sitting with."

"I feel as though I have been having conversations like this all my life. None of us is young anymore, but what has just taken place could have happened when I was sixteen, or twenty, or twenty-five. We got to adolescence and just stopped dead; we drew up the map then and left the boundaries exactly as they were."

"I want to be a well-rounded human being with none of these knotty lumps of rage and guilt and self-disgust."

"I've spent nearly thirty years listening to people singing about broken hearts, and has it helped me any? Has it fuck."

"It seems to me that if you place music (and books, probably, and films, and plays, and anything that makes you feel) at the center of your being, then you can't afford to sort out your love life, start to think of it as the finished product. You've got to pick at it, keep it alive and in turmoil, you've got to pick at it and unravel it until it all comes apart and you're compelled to start all over again. Maybe we all live life at too high a pitch, those of us who absorb emotional things all day, and as a consequence we can never feel merely content: we have to be unhappy, or ecstatically, head-over-heels happy, and those states are difficult to achieve within a stable, solid relationship."

"This is how she talks, as if nobody has ever had a conversation about this in the entire history of the world."

"You just have to smile and take it, otherwise it would drive you mad."

"When they've gone, I realize that I spent the whole time drinking instead of speaking, and as a consequence I can no longer focus properly."

"These aren't flesh wounds. These are life-threatening thrusts into the internal organs."

"'You're being deliberately obtuse.'"

"If people have to die, I don't want them dying near me. My mum and dad won't die near me, I've made bloody sure of that. When they go, I'll hardly feel a thing."

"'I can either stick up for myself sometimes or I can believe anything you say about me and end up hating myself every minute of the day.'"

"Every time I think I have got to the bottom, I find a new way to sink even lower, but I know that this is the worst, and that whatever happens to me from now on, however poor or stupid or single I get, these few minutes will remain with me as a shining cautionary beacon."

"What happened to me during the funeral was something like this: I saw, for the first time, how scared I am of dying, and of other people dying, and how this fear has prevented me from doing all sorts of things, like giving up smoking (because if you take death too seriously or not seriously enough, as I have been doing up till now, then what's the point?), and thinking about my life, especially my job, in a way that contains a concept of the future (too scary, because the future ends in death). But most of all it has prevented me from sticking with a relationship, because if you stick with a relationship, and your life becomes dependent on that person's life, and then they die, as they are bound to do, unless there are exceptional circumstances, e.g., they are a character from a science-fiction novel...well, you're up the creek without a paddle, aren't you?"

"'All I'm saying is that if you believe in a long-term monogamous relationship at all, then you have to allow for things happening to people, and you have to allow for things not happening to people. Otherwise, what's the use?"

"I've been thinking with my guts since I was fourteen years old, and frankly speaking, between you and me, I have come to the conclusion that my guts have shit for brains."

"'Just because it's a relationship, and it's based on soppy stuff, it doesn't mean you can't make intellectual decisions about it. Sometimes you just have to, otherwise you'll never get anywhere.'"