High Fidelity Quotes
"Could he have spent his life with someone who has a bad record collection?"
"Life as an episode of thirtysomething might not be so bad."
"I felt as though I made a face and the wind changed, and now I have to go through life grimacing in this horrible way."
"How can that not leave you bruised somewhere?"
"Nobody worries about kids listening to thousands, literally thousands, of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss."
"I'm sick of the sight of the place, to be honest."
"In a hostile and unpredictable world, we rely on each other to provide something to count on."
"The Beatles belong to me, not to me and Laura, or me and Charlie, or me and Alison Ashworth."
"Women’s knickers were a terrible disappointment to me when I embarked on my cohabiting career."
"If I lived in Bosnia, then not having a girlfriend wouldn’t seem like the most important thing in the world, but here in Crouch End it does."
"There’s a whole world in here, a nicer, dirtier, more violent, more peaceful, more colorful, sleazier, more dangerous, more loving world than the world I live in."
"I am very good at the past. It’s the present I can’t understand."
"To look down on a roomful of heads all bobbing away to the music you have chosen is an uplifting thing."
"A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do."
"Sometimes—not so often recently—I could do something or say something that allowed her to escape from herself, and that’s when we worked best."
"I used modern stuff every now and again, at times of crisis, just like people who believe in homeopathy have to use conventional medicine sometimes, even though they disapprove of it."
"You can spot the vinyl addicts because after a while they get fed up with the rack they are flicking through, march over to a completely different section of the shop, pull a sleeve out from the middle somewhere, and come over to the counter."
"When I found it for him (it was an old reggae thing, ‘Happy Go Lucky Girl’ by the Paragons), and it was more or less exactly as it had appeared to him in his sleep, the look on his face made me feel as though I was not a man who ran a record shop, but a midwife, or a painter, someone whose life is routinely transcendental."
"It is a prickly, clammy, panicky sensation, and you go out of the shop reeling."
"She changed when she got the new job. She was always intense, but, before, the intensity had somewhere to go."
"Sex, in fact, is the most absorbing activity I have discovered in adulthood."
"I wake up around dawn, and I have the same feeling I had the other night, the night I caught on about Laura and Ray: that I’ve got no ballast, nothing to weigh me down, and if I don’t hang on, I’ll just float away."
"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."
"It’s only afterwards that we really set ourselves apart from the rest, though: a quick and rueful peck on the cheek, and I have the rest of Sunday to myself, whether I want it or not."
"They’re OK, if you like that sort of thing, which I don’t."
"It was a terrible place to grow up, I suppose, but I didn’t really mind."
"In Bruce Springsteen songs, you can either stay and rot, or you can escape and burn."
"But nobody ever writes about how it is possible to escape and rot—how escapes can go off at half-cock, how you can leave the suburbs for the city but end up living a limp suburban life anyway."
"I’ve spent nearly thirty years listening to people singing about broken hearts, and has it helped me any? Has it fuck."
"Maybe we all live life at too high a pitch, those of us who absorb emotional things all day."
"If you’ve found the right person, you’ve found the right person, it doesn’t matter how old you are." - Phil
"You have to work at relationships. You can’t just walk out on them every time something goes wrong." - Jackie
"You can’t just jump into bed with the first person you fancy and hope that you don’t damage your marriage, no matter what people think." - Phil
"I haven’t got the heart for the rejection conversation."
"Birthdays should be suspended in years like this one: there should be a law, of man if not of nature, that you are only allowed to age when things are ticking along nicely."
"I’m not asking you to do it every night. I’m ... Look, I’ll give you the two quid, all right?"
"I don’t really know any of these people, not even the one I’ve slept with, and for the first time since I split up with Laura, I really feel like slumping onto the floor and bawling my eyes out. I’m homesick."
"Never again will this combination of people be seated around a table; it just couldn’t possibly happen, and it shows."
"It’s supposed to be women who allow themselves to become isolated by relationships."
"My relationship was what gave me my sense of location. And if you lose your sense of location, you get homesick. Stands to reason."
"I’ve run out of puff, and come to a gentle halt in the middle of nowhere."
"There’s not much you can decipher in their faces, really. There’s not much that sets them apart from single people."
"Surely people who are happy should look happy, at all times."
"Nothing much, by which I mean even less than usual, happens for a couple of weeks."
"It’s OK if I die first, I guess, but having to die before someone else dies isn’t a necessity that cheers me up much."
"I’ve thought about how I would feel if Laura died, and how Laura would feel if I died, and how I’d feel if my mum or dad died, but I never thought about Laura’s mum or dad dying."
"You’re supposed to wish things when people die, to fill yourself full of regrets."
"He was my common-law father-in-law, and we were very different, and he was sick, and … we were as close as we needed to be."
"If you want to find a way to extract death’s sting, then Barry’s your man."
"Everything that’s ever gone wrong for me could have been rescued by the wave of a bank manager’s wand, or by a girlfriend’s sudden change of mind."
"I don’t want to have to cope with the sort of unhappiness Laura’s feeling, not ever."
"What happens if you refuse on the grounds of it being just too fucking grim?"
"I’m only going because it might do me some good in the long run."
"It makes more sense to hop from woman to woman until you’re too old to do it anymore, and then you live alone and die alone."
"If I saw Janet Lydon’s face at the crematorium … how can you be that brave?"
"But the argument carries on, goes around corners, crosses the road, turns back on itself, and eventually ends up somewhere neither of us has ever been before."
"You just … you just don’t do anything. You get lost in your head, and you sit around thinking instead of getting on with something."
"I want you to see that I'm not entirely defined by my relationship with you."
"I would have worked that out for myself, in the end."
"But you're not perfect, and you're certainly not happy."
"It's not huge eyes almost bursting with longing... it's just as likely to be the look of benevolent indulgence that a mother gives a toddler."
"It's not the cellulite or the crow's feet. It's the ... the ... the disrespect."
"Maybe this is how people manage to have relationships."
"How can you fail to fall in love with someone who wants to interview you for a newspaper?"
"And then I'll find something to get excited about again: the fact that she's turned up at all, a sexy voice, intelligence, wit, something."