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.'" Read more!

The Stranger

Basic plot descriptions led me to believe it that The Stranger by Albert Camus was mostly just a precursor to Burgess: a disaffected youth and his run-in with the legal system. However, the book itself had much more of Camus's philosophy packed into it than I expected in only 123 pages. A solid read; easily in my top-ten.


"I said, 'Yes,' just so I wouldn't have to say anything else."

"Having this presence breathing down my neck was starting to annoy me."

"He'd told me that they had to bury her quickly, because it gets hot in the plains, especially in this part of the country. That was when he told me he had lived in Paris and that he had found it hard to forget it. In Paris they kept vigil over the body for three, sometimes four days. But here you barely have time to get used to the idea before you have to start running after the hearse."
"I could feel the blood pounding in my temples."

"I had the whole sky in my eyes and it was blue and gold."

"Generally speaking, he's not very popular. But he often talks to me and sometimes stops by my place for a minute, because I listen to him. I find what he has to say interesting. Besides, I don't have any reason not to talk to him."

"'You don't realize that everybody's jealous of how good you have it with me. Someday you'll know just how good it was.'"

"I kissed her. We didn't say anything more from that point on. I held her to me and we hurried to catch a bus, get back, go to my place, and throw ourselves onto my bed."

"A minute later she asked me if I loved her. I told her it didn't mean anything but that I didn't think so."

"I said that people never change their lives, that in any case one life was as good as another and that I wasn't dissatisfied with mine here at all."

"When I was a student, I had lots of ambitions like that. But when I had to give up my studies I learned very quickly that none of it really mattered."

"...it was like knocking four quick times on the door of unhappiness."

"At one time or another all normal people have wished their loved ones were dead."

"He said it was impossible; all men believed in God, even those who turn their backs on him. That was his belief, and if he were ever to doubt it, his life would become meaningless."

"I think that at first I hadn't realized that all those people were crowding in to see me. Usually people didn't pay much attention to me. It took some doing on my part to understand that I was the cause of all the excitement."

"Everything was happening without my participation. My fate was being decided without anyone so much as asking my opinion."

"My mind was always on what was coming next, today or tomorrow."

"I was listening to my heartbeat. I couldn't imagine that this sound which had been with me for so long could ever stop. I've never really had much of an imagination. But still I would try to picture the exact moment when the beating of my heart would no longer be going on inside my head."

"Since we're all going to die, it's obvious that when and how don't matter."

"He wasn't even sure he was alive, because he was living like a dead man." Read more!

I Pass Like Night

Jonathan Ames teeters somewhere between clarity and overwhelming perversion, with a nod in there somewhere to minimalism. Alexander Vine, the protagonist of I Pass Like Night, is an omnivorous sex addict and an eager confidant of the friendly, lawless inhabitants of late-night Manhattan. In this relatively short novel, Ames gives us a jumbled history of Alexander's increasingly amoral life. Amid the stories of prostitution, alcoholism, and accidental homosexuality, Alexander emerges as a very human, albeit very confused, 20-something.

"And I thought to myself, the most sobering thing in the world is to look in the mirror and see how ugly you really are."

"He says that with all the whores on the street that he feels like he's in a candy store or toy department of women."

"During these last few weeks the clouds had been storing up poisons like an alcoholic's liver, and I didn't want to be caught underneath it now that it had been sliced open."

"For years I had been looking for a way to describe how I felt, and she had put it so perfectly, so simply: gutted like a fish."
"A queasy feeling came over me that has marked almost every erotic experience I've ever had."

"I walked towards Delancey and a bum was passed out, lying beside a building, and I saw that he had no arms and there was a can tied around his neck for money. I got to the corner and waited for the light to change and I thought to myself, men without hands can't really beg."

"That's how it began, but how it ended I don't really remember because there was no last time, like a first time, just a slow fade."

"But I'm clean now. All my diseases are gone and I'm a lot more careful these days. I still do have some small scars, but you can't see them at night, in the dark, in my bed."

"And sometimes I feel sorry for my penis, I make it do things it probably doesn't want to do, but it obliges anyways, and must think that everything is for a higher purpose."

"I said goodbye and left them chattering and complaining, like people everywhere that's what they do best."

"I thought of all the people I'd slept with in my life, all the bodies I'd touched, and how they would fill the whole room."

"But I knew she'd come back in a few days, it's a vicious cycle, and I wondered to myself, 'Why does she want me? Can't she see what I am?'"

"So I grew up in a state of constant preparation for disaster."

"The general rule for self preservation that was taught to me is this: Expect the worst and maybe it won't happen to you."

"Then other times she tells me about the pills she keeps in her top drawer 'just in case,' and how knowing the pills are there gives her a sense of security. She says things like that and I start feeling comfortable like I'm on common ground again because she's like all the other girls I've known, semi-suicidal."

"It was very quiet and I listened and my body was like a house and I could hear different doors slamming."

"I was sitting there and sort of hoping that somebody I knew would walk by, but it was almost three o'clock and I don't know many people."

"My head spun a little from the booze, but I was ready."

"All over my body, in my lower back, in my hands, in my stomach, along the shelf of my hips, in my arms, are bags and boxes of hates and angers, and that night in front of the boy's house is down there somewhere, making little cancers maybe, but it's closed tight for now. Thought that first night it leaked a little while I rode my bike and punished my legs on the hills and hated my town and hated all the ugly houses."

"I saw him less and less frequently, but we still went to an occasional movie or diner and I never told him once how I felt. It went on like that for a year and a half and I always thought it would change, that one day in the same way that it somehow had disappeared, it would come back and we'd be best friends again. So I hung on to whatever time he gave me and when you're wrapped up in it you think you're floating, but really I was just drowning more."

"I had loved him, but I didn't know how to love, and so he had always hated me and when he was ready he left me. And he was right to do it."

"...I know in my mind for the first time in my life--I've never believed that I would die. I've never even believed anybody else has died."

"I'm always looking for the person who replaces me, who thinks the things I do, who fills in for me when I'm not there. I know there is someone younger than me doing what I did and someone older doing what I will do, and someone my age being just like me."

"Then I felt something cold on my hip and I shivered with revulsion, because I'd fallen asleep and then woken up and remembered what we'd just done. I had been lost in the warm blankets and the sounds of the street outside, but then I heard her swallow and then felt the liquid and I knew we had these horrible bodies with holes and fluids and I was hating myself."
Read more!

The Mother's Recompense

This novel by Edith Wharton (The Age of Innocence, Ethan Frome) is concerned with the act of expatriation and how strange one can find their old country upon returning to it. This is especially true when the country is America at the turn of the 20th century. Oh, and I guess a vaguely-incestual love triangle would likewise complicate the homecoming. Of interest stylistically is the sparse use of psychonarration.

"Everything in her mind was hot and cold..."

"'It must,' she thought, 'be a little like the way the gravestones will behave on the Day of Judgment.'"

"Life still dated for her from that day--in spite of the way he had hurt her, of his having inflicted on her the bitterest pain she had ever suffered, he had yet given her more than he could take away."
"But gradually it came over her that to feel alone was not in the least what she wanted. She had never, for years at any rate, been able to bear it for long; the crowd, formerly a solace and an escape, had become a habit, and being face to face with her own thoughts was like facing a stranger."

"Yes: the war had brought them peace, strange and horrible as it was to think it."

"The overwhelming changes had all happened, in a whirl, during the years of her absence; and meanwhile she had been living in quiet backwaters, or in the steady European capitals where renewals make so little mark on the unyielding surface of the past."

"The war had swallowed her up, her and all her little concerns, as it had engulfed so many million others. It seemed written that, till the end, he should have to be thankful for the war."

"But the young people--what did they think? That would be the interesting thing to know. They had all, she gathered, far more interests and ideas than had scantily furnished her own youth, but all so broken up, scattered, and perpetually interrupted by the strenuous labour of their endless forms of sport, that they reminded her of a band of young entomologists, equipped with the newest thing in nets, but in far too great a hurry ever to catch anything. Yet perhaps it seemed so only to the slower motions of middle-age."

"'I hate talking. I only like noises that don't mean anything.'"

"The truth came to her, after that first evening, with the surprised discovery that the family had refrained from touching on her past not so much from prudery, or discretion even, as because such retrogressions were jolting uncomfortable affairs, and the line of least resistance flowed forward, not back."

"'I suppose I'm old-fashioned. Nothing shocks the young people nowadays--not even the Bible."

"It was evidently her pride to be perpetually invited, perpetually swamped in a multiplicity of boring engagements."

"'Life, for her, wherever she is, consists in going somewhere else in order to do exactly the same thing.'"

"They continued to stand facing each other, their inspiration spent, as if waiting for the accident that had swept them together to whirl them apart again."

"What did she know of any one of them? Nothing more, she now understood, than their glazed and impenetrable surfaces."

"'How can anybody love one day, and not the next?'"

"Her question seemed to drop into the silence like a shout; as if she had let fall a platter of brass on a marble floor."

"Who had suffered most the previous evening, he or she?"

"'The thing in the world I'm most afraid of is sterile pain,' he said after a moment. 'I should never want any one to be the cause of that.'"

"What a help it must be to turn to somebody who could tell one firmly, positively what to do--to be able to lay down one's moral torture like a heavy load at the end of the day!"

"She reflected with self-derision that all her suicidal impulses seemed to end in the same way; by landing her in the arms of some man she didn't care for."

"It was curious, in what neatly recurring patterns events often worked themselves out."

"Yes; it was true; she knew it herself: she had to go on cramming things into her days, things good, bad or indifferent, it hardly mattered which as long as they were crammed tight enough to leave no chinks for backward glances."

"'Never is a long word.'" Read more!

What Maisie Knew

What Maisie Knew is a coming-of-age story that details the character's cognitive development in interesting, experimental ways. It is Henry James' increasingly scandalous novel of divorce, infidelity, and the deterioration of the institution of family. Though in some ways on the cusp of Modernism, James is still very much stuck in the 19th century--his descriptions drag on, his diction is haughty and difficult. While certainly an elaborate, well-crafted novel, it is not exactly one that is initially readable.

"She was at the age for which all stories are true and all conceptions are stories."

"She was as droll as a charade or an animal towards the end of 'natural history' -a person whom people, to make talk lively, described to each other and imitated."

"She took refuge on the firm ground of fiction, through which indeed there curled the blue river of truth."

"Everything had something behind it: life was like a long, long corridor with rows of closed doors."

"There had been times when she had had to make the best of the impression that she was herself deceitful; yet she had never concealed anything bigger than a thought."

"'Fear, unfortunately, is a very big thing, and there's a great variety of kinds.'"

"'We do nothing in life but quarrel.'"

"'I've not killed anything,' he said; 'on the contrary I think I've produced life. I don't know what to call it - I haven't even known how decently to deal with it, to approach it; but, whatever it is, it's the most beautiful thing I've ever met - it's exquisite, it's sacred.'"

"'Have you been a hideous little hypocrite all these years that I've slaved to make you love me and deludedly believed you did?'" Read more!