Juliet, Naked Quotes

“The truth about life was that nothing ever ended until you died, and even then you just left a whole bunch of unresolved narratives behind you.”
― Nick Hornby, Juliet, Naked

“For the best part of 40 years she had genuinely believed that not doing things would somehow prevent regret, when, of course, the exact opposite was true.”
― Nick Hornby, Juliet, Naked

“So it's not about what you do. It can't be, can it? It has to be about how you are, how you love, how you treat yourself and those around you, and that's where I get eaten up.”
― Nick Hornby, Juliet, Naked

“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.”
― Nick Hornby, Juliet, Naked

“The truth about autobiographical songs, he realized, was that you had to make the present become the past, somehow: you had to take a feeling or a friend or a woman and turn whatever it was into something that was over, so that you could be definitive about it. You had to put it in a glass case and look at it and think about it until it gave up its meaning.”
― Nick Hornby, Juliet, Naked

“But then, that was the trouble with relationships generally. They had their own temperature and there was no thermostat.”
― Nick Hornby, Juliet, Naked

“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.”
― Nick Hornby, Juliet, Naked

“He was now beginning to wonder whether the jigsaw was the correct metaphor for relationships between me and women after all. It didn't take account of the sheer stubbornness of human beings, their determination to affix themselves to another even if they didn't fit. They didn't care about jutting off at weird angles, and they didn't care about phone booths and Mary, Queen of Scots. They were motivated not by seamless and sensible matching, but by eyes, mouths, smiles, minds, breasts and chests and bottoms, wit, kindness, charm, romantic history and all sorts of other things that made straight edges impossible to achieve.”
― Nick Hornby, Juliet, Naked

“Everyone disliked their partners at some time or another, she knew that. But she’d spent her hours in the dark wondering whether she’d ever liked him. Would it really have been so much worse to spend those years alone? Why did there have to be someone else in the room while she was eating, watching TV, sleeping?”
― Nick Hornby, Juliet, Naked

“She stopped typing. If she’d been using pen and paper, she would have screwed the paper up in disgust, but there wasn’t a satisfying equivalent with email, seeing as everything was designed to stop you making a mistake. She needed a fuck-it key, something that made a satisfying ka-boom noise when you thumped it.”
― Nick Hornby, Juliet, Naked

“She was trying to say something else; she was trying to say that the inability to articulate what one feels in any satisfactory way is one of our enduring tragedies. It wouldn't have been much, and it wouldn't have been useful, but it would have been something that reflected the gravity and the sadness inside her. Instead, she had snapped at him for being a loser. It was as if she were trying to find a handhold on the boulder of her feelings, and had merely ended up with grit under her nails.”
― Nick Hornby, Juliet, Naked

“Linda seemed to recognize loneliness. Possibly she could see it sitting opposite her, sipping lager and trying not to lose its temper. It was an illness, loneliness--it made you weak, gullible, feebleminded.”
― Nick Hornby, Juliet, Naked

“He'd told her it was just a scratch and got cross when she hadn't offered morphine.”
― Nick Hornby, Juliet, Naked

“He had never once felt itchy, in the way that two connecting pieces of a jigsaw never felt itchy, as far as one could tell. If one were to imagine, for the sake of argument, that jigsaw pieces had thoughts and feelings, then it was possible to imagine them saying to themselves, 'I'm going to stay here. Where else would I go?' And if another jigsaw piece came along, offering its tabs and blanks enticingly in an attempt to lure one of the pieces away, it would be easy to resist temptation. 'Look,' the object of the seducer's admiration would say. 'You're a bit of telephone box, and I'm the face of Mary, Queen of Scots. We just wouldn't look right together.' And that would be that.”
― Nick Hornby, Juliet, Naked

“The artistic temperament is particularly unhelpful if it is just that, with no end product.”
― Nick Hornby, Juliet, Naked

“You know that bad people can make great art, don’t you?’Said Annie.
‘Yes, of course. Some of the people whose art I admire the most are assholes.’
‘Dickens wasn’t nice to his wife.’
‘Dickens didn’t make a memoir called I’m Nice to My Wife.”
― Nick Hornby, Juliet, Naked

“The cliche had it that kids were the future, but that wasn't it: they were the unreflective, active present. They were not themselves nostalgic, because they couldn't be, and they retarded nostalgia in their parents. Even as they were getting sick and being bullied and becoming addicted to heroin and getting pregnant, they were in the moment, and she wanted to be in it with them. She wanted to worry herself sick about schools and bullying and drugs.”
― Nick Hornby, Juliet, Naked

“There was an awful lot to be said for familiarity, if you thought about it. It was an extremely underrated virtue, ignorable until the very moment that you were in danger of losing whatever or whoever it was that was familiar.”
― Nick Hornby, Juliet, Naked

“It was hopeless, life, really. It was set up all wrong.”
― Nick Hornby, Juliet, Naked

“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.”
― Nick Hornby, Juliet, Naked

“I'm coming to London next week, by the way, in unhappy circumstances. Are we getting on fine as we are? Or would you like a drink?”
― Nick Hornby, Juliet, Naked

“He would read up on parenting, if he thought it would help, but his errors always seemed too basic for the manuals. "Always tell your kids they have siblings..." He couldn't imagine any child-raising guru taking the trouble to write that down. Maybe there was a gap in the market.”
― Nick Hornby, Juliet, Naked

“We're here for such a short amount of time. Why do we spend any of it building sandcastles?”
― Nick Hornby, Juliet, Naked

“But the internet had changed everything: nobody was forgotten anymore.”
― Nick Hornby, Juliet, Naked

“Oh, it was a complicated business, loving art. It involved a lot more ill will than one might have suspected.”
― Nick Hornby, Juliet, Naked

“It was the absences that had made her think, not the presences.”
― Nick Hornby, Juliet, Naked

“Do you need someone to talk to?" she said gently.
"Oh. Thank you. No, no, I'm fine."
He touched his face – he'd been crying harder than he'd realized.
"You sure? You don't look fine."
"No, really. I've just . . . I've just had a very intense emotional experience." He held out one of his iPod headphones, as if that would explain it. "On here."
"You're crying about music?"
The woman looked at him as if he were some kind of pervert.
"Well," said Duncan. "I'm not crying about it. I'm not sure that's the right preposition."
She shook her head and walked off.”
― Nick Hornby, Juliet, Naked

“And I have to say, books haven’t helped much with all this. Because whenever you read anything about love, whenever anyone tries to define it, there’s always a state or an abstract noun, and I try to think of it like that. But actually, love is… Well, it’s just you. And when you go, it’s gone. Nothing abstract about it.”
― Nick Hornby, Juliet, Naked

“If he'd known how long he was going to spend in the airport lounge of his own life, he'd have made different travel arrangements..”
― Nick Hornby, Juliet, Naked

“She was the spare room that never got tidied, the e-mail that never got answered, the loan that never got repaid, the symptom that never got described to a doctor.”
― Nick Hornby, Juliet, Naked