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From the beloved New York Times bestselling author, a quintessential Nick Hornby tale of music, superfandom and the truths and lies we tell ourselves about life and love. Annie loves Duncan — or thinks she does. Duncan loves Annie, but then, all of a sudden, he doesn't. Duncan really loves... read more

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Quotes edit see section history

  • “Elvis had a good toilet moment. Pretty career-defining, too.”
    Annie
  • “You don't drink, you don't listen to music ... Why do you even ask me to go out at night? How about this? You want to see me, we'll meet for breakfast. Except you probably disapprove of eggs. Or you used to snort them, back in the eighties, so you can't be in the same room as them now”
    John/ Fake Tucker
  • “Good for you. I bet your bowels work better than mine, too.”
    Tucker Crowe
  • “She knew from her book group that novels none of them had enjoyed could produce stimulating and sometimes even useful conversation; it was the absences in 'Naked' (and, therefore, in Duncan) that had made her think, not the prescences”
  • “Its the National Health Service. They usually want to keep you out of hospital. The governemt can't afford you, and anyway the hospitals kill you”
    Annie
  • Popular Highlights from Kindle Customers
  • 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.
    Highlighted by 90 Kindle customers
  • 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.
    Highlighted by 89 Kindle customers
  • 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.
    Highlighted by 87 Kindle customers
  • For the best part of forty years she had genuinely believed that not doing things would somehow prevent regret, when, of course, the exact opposite was true. Her youth was over, but there might be some life left in life yet.
    Highlighted by 67 Kindle customers
  • 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.
    Highlighted by 60 Kindle customers
  • she was trying to say that the inability to articulate what one feels in any satisfactory way is one of our enduring tragedies.
    Highlighted by 58 Kindle customers
  • Experience, then, was something that enabled you to do nothing with a clear conscience. Experience was an overrated quality.
    Highlighted by 50 Kindle customers
  • The whole point of you is that you’re not the sort of person anyone fights over. You’re my easy life option. The moment you stop being that, you’re no option at all.”
    Highlighted by 45 Kindle customers
  • 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—a house, a view, a partner.
    Highlighted by 44 Kindle customers
  • There was the same need for obscurity, the same suspicion that if a piece of music had reached a large number of people, it had somehow been drained of its worth.
    Highlighted by 36 Kindle customers
Show all 15 quotes from this book

First Sentence edit see section history

They had flown from England to Minneapolis to look at a toilet.

Glossary edit see section history

  • bathetic: bathos n. (esp. in a work of literature) an effect of anticlimax created by an unintentional lapse in mood from the sublime to the trivial or ridiculous.

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

  1. Nick Hornby (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Original Language: English
Publisher: Riverhead
Country: United Kingdom
Publication Date: 2009
ISBN: 3462041398
Page Count: 416

Awards edit see section history

Classification edit see section history

More Books Like This edit see section history

   
  • High Fidelity
  • Songbook
  • Killing Yourself to Live
  • Fargo Rock City
  • Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist

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