August 2, 2010

"Juliet, Naked"

Just finished yesterday "Juliet, Naked", the most recent novel by Nick Hornby. I liked it a lot, I am a big fan of him and enjoy his novels absolutely. "High Fidelity" is still my favorite, but "Juliet, Naked" is more sophisticated (maybe that is why I liked it less, since Nick shouldn't be that sophisticated, I think). Nick Hornby has understood and represented better than anyone else what does a relationship in our days mean.

I underlined this:

"She knew that playing the CD was an act of naked hostility, even if anyone peering through the windows wouldn't be able to see the nakedness".

"Where had this ill-feeling sprung from? It wasn't as if their relationship was any more precarious than it ever had been".

"One thing about great art: it made you love people more, forgive them their petty transgressions".

"[...] the truth about anyone is disappointing, the truth about me specially so".

"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".

"The cliché 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".

"- [...] And you're the only artist alive who's made any sense to him, just about".
- The only artist alive? Jesus Christ. I could write you a list of a hundred people better than me off the top of my head.
- It's not about better, Tucker. You speak to him. For him. He connects. You plug into a very complicated-looking socket in his back. I don't know why, but you do".

"I don't think people with talent necessarily value it, because it all comes so easy to them, and we never value things that come easy to us".

"If everyone was determined to make it work, then it would".

"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".

"She was saying 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".


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