Just Like You

by Nick Hornby

It was just that somehow, Ted’s over-thoughtfulness had tipped over into wetness and self-pity.

But subsiding rage was not the same thing as love.

but every time he got stopped by the police when he was coming home late at night and was forced to turn out his pockets, it took him further away from all the journalists and actors and politicians to whom he sold organic beef on a Saturday.

But the weird thing about being his age was that you spent half your time dreaming about what might happen to you, and the other half trying not to think about it, and either way you were stuck living a life that didn’t seem to count for much, somewhere halfway between childhood and whatever permanent adulthood might bring.

And maybe there was no future in it, but there was a present, and that’s what life consists of.

Her thing with Joseph existed only when they were together, in the same room, it seemed to her now. And if they weren’t in the same room, then it wasn’t anything at all.

her knowledge of elsewhere gave her temporary authority as an expert in how the other fifty-two percent thought.

He just seemed to decide that he’d had enough of engaging with the world around him, or the people who lived in it. Or maybe he had simply come to the conclusion that the people he knew best had said everything they had to say, but they said it again anyway, and he was unwilling to go around for a third or fourth time.

She’d been sitting there, thinking thoughts and making judgments, and having this access to them reminded him that she was both separate and part of him at the same time. He

“I don’t know. The older I get, the more I realize I don’t know much about much.”

Lucy had strong views on the privatization of social housing, and she had expressed them many times. She had never expressed them to a beneficiary of Mrs. Thatcher’s largesse, however, and she could now see that she never would. She’d save her bitter opposition for the ears of people with six- or seven-figure mortgages.

And could you only love someone who thought the same way as you, or were there other bridges to be built farther up the river? Could you just tunnel under the whole mess, even?

Deciding to forgive, after all, was not the same thing as forgiveness.