"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."
— Nick Hornby

"People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobodies worries about kids listening to thousands - literally thousands - of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss."
— Nick Hornby (High Fidelity)

"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."
— Nick Hornby (How to Be Good)

"What came first – the music or the misery? Did I listen to music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to music? Do all those records turn you into a melancholy person? People worry about kids playing with guns, and teenagers watching violent videos; we are scared that some sort of culture of violence will take them over. Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands – literally thousands – of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss. 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."
— Nick Hornby (High Fidelity: A Novel)

" Maybe we all live life at too high a pitch, those of us who absorb emotional things all day, and as mere 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."
— Nick Hornby (High Fidelity: A Novel)

"One could argue that most of the trouble in the world is caused by introspection."
— Nick Hornby (A Long Way Down)

"Everyone knows how to talk, and no one knows what to say."
— Nick Hornby (A Long Way Down)

"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..."
— Nick Hornby (How to Be Good)

"I'm a good person. In most ways. But I'm beginning to think that being a good person in most ways doesn't count for anything very much, if your a bad person in one way."
— Nick Hornby (How to Be Good)

"The truth will set you free. Either that or it'll get you a punch in the nose. "
— Nick Hornby (A Long Way Down)

"He's at the chocolate teapot end of the competency scale."
— Nick Hornby (A Long Way Down)

"Please stop patronizing those who are reading a book - The Da Vinci Code, maybe- because they are enjoying it. For a start, none of us know what kind of an effort this represents for the individual reader. It could be his or her first full-length adult novel; it might be the book that finally reveals the purpose and joy of reading to someone who has hitherto been mystified by the attraction books exert on others. And anyway, reading for enjoyment is what we should all be doing. I don't mean we should all be reading chick lit or thrillers (although if that's what you want to read, it's fine by me, because here's something no one else will tell you: if you don't read the classics, or the novel that won this year's Booker Prize, then nothing bad will happen to you; more importantly,nothing good will happen to you if you do); I simply mean that turning pages should not be like walking through thick mud. The whole purpose of books is that we read them, and if you find you can't, it might not be your inadequacy that's to blame. "Good" books can be pretty awful sometimes."
— Nick Hornby (Housekeeping vs. The Dirt)

"A man who wants to die feels angry and full of life and desperate and bored and exhausted, all at the same time; he wants to fight everyone, and he wants to curl up in a ball and hide in a cupboard somewhere. He wants to say sorry to everyone, and he wants everyone to know just how badly they've all let him down."
— Nick Hornby (A Long Way Down)

"If you really wanted to mess me up, you should have got to me earlier."
— Nick Hornby (High Fidelity)

"Sometimes you know you've got a chance wtith 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. "
— Nick Hornby (Slam)

"For alarmingly large chunks of an average day, I am a moron."
— Nick Hornby (Fever Pitch)

"It is the act of reading itselft that I miss, the opportunity to retreat further and further from the world until I have found some space, some air that isn't stale, that hasn't been breathed by my family a thousand times already."
— Nick Hornby (How to Be Good)

""Maybe the best thing to do with favorite books is to leave them be: to achieve such exalted position means that they entered your life at exactly the right time, in precisely the right place, and those conditions can never be recreated.""
— Nick Hornby

"What do you want from me?" he asks.
What I want from every person in my life, I want to tell him.
More."
— Melina Marchetta (Jellicoe Road)

"I can't believe I said it out loud. The truth doesn't set you free, you know. It makes you feel awkward and embarrassed and defenseless and red in the face and horrified and petrified and vulnerable. But free? I don't feel free. I feel like shit."
— Melina Marchetta (Saving Francesca)

"Is a person worth more because they have someone to grieve for them?"
— Melina Marchetta (On The Jellicoe Road)

"I don't say anything and he casually leans against my desk, picking up the novel that's sitting there.

"It's bullshit," he tells me, flicking through it. "There's no such thing as Atticus Finch."

I shrug. "It'd be nice if there was, though.""
— Melina Marchetta (On The Jellicoe Road)

"Don't believe in God. Love the world just the way it is. "
— Melina Marchetta (On The Jellicoe Road)

"From this distance everything is so bloody perfect."
— Melina Marchetta (On The Jellicoe Road)

"I'm very disturbed to find out that the leader of the Townies has a soul and I'm beginning to develop a bit of a crush on him."
— Melina Marchetta (On The Jellicoe Road)

"Santangelo is irritated. 'We're not suppose to be collaborating. It's supposed to be a war and you're supposed to stick to the boundaries.'

'We've seen you in your jocks,' she reminds him. 'Taylor and Griggs have pashed. You've broken into your father's police station for us. Don't you think the war has lost a bit of its tension?'"
— Melina Marchetta (On The Jellicoe Road)

"Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia. (...) You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present."
— John Green (Looking for Alaska)

"Books are the ultimate Dumpees: put them down and they’ll wait for you forever; pay attention to them and they always love you back."
— John Green (An Abundance of Katherines)

"The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive."
— John Green (Looking for Alaska)

"...you don't remember what happened. What you remember becomes what happened."
— John Green (An Abundance of Katherines)

"Saying 'I notice you're a nerd' is like saying, 'Hey, I notice that you'd rather be intelligent than be stupid, that you'd rather be thoughtful than be vapid, that you believe that there are things that matter more than the arrest record of Lindsay Lohan. Why is that?' In fact, it seems to me that most contemporary insults are pretty lame. Even 'lame' is kind of lame. Saying 'You're lame' is like saying 'You walk with a limp.' Yeah, whatever, so does 50 Cent, and he's done all right for himself."
— John Green

"Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people."
— Eleanor Roosevelt

"So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was a hurricane."
— John Green (Looking for Alaska)

"You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children."
— Madeleine L'Engle

"You can never be overdressed or overeducated."
— Oscar Wilde

"It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it."
— Oscar Wilde

"When he shall die, take him and cut him out into little stars and he shall make the face of heaven so fine that all the world will be in love with night and pay no worship to the garish sun."
— William Shakespeare

"Live to the point of tears."
— Albert Camus

"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one."
— Albert Einstein

"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind."
— Dr. Seuss

"A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment."
— Jane Austen

"Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?"
— J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows)

"Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living"
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

"If there is no love in the world, we will make a new world, and we will give it walls, and we will furnish it with soft, red interiors, from the inside out, and give it a knocker that resonates like a diamond falling to a jeweller's felt so that we should never hear it. Love me, because love doesn't exist, and I have tried everything that does."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Everything is Illuminated: A Novel)

"I'm sorry for my inability to let unimportant things go, for my inability to hold on to the important things."
— Jonathan Safran Foer

"I think and think and think, I‘ve thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it."
— Jonathan Safran Foer

"You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness."
— Jonathan Safran Foer

"Why didn't I learn to treat everything like it was the last time. My greatest regret was how much I believed in the future."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

"She wants to know if I love her, that's all anyone wants from anyone else, not love itself but the knowledge that love is there, like new batteries in the flashlight in the emergency kit in the hall closet."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

"What about little microphones? What if everyone swallowed them, and they played the sounds of our hearts through little speakers, which could be in the pouches of our overalls? When you skateboarded down the street at night you could hear everyone's heartbeat, and they could hear yours, sort of like sonar. One weird thing is, I wonder if everyone's hearts would start to beat at the same time, like how women who live together have their menstrual periods at the same time, which I know about, but don't really want to know about. That would be so weird, except that the place in the hospital where babies are born would sound like a crystal chandelier in a houseboat, because the babies wouldn't have had time to match up their heartbeats yet. And at the finish line at the end of the New York City Marathon it would sound like war."
— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)