Nick Hornby Quotes

We had no money. My family was in Southie; I was in affluent Brookline. I don't know if it's my personality or the circumstance, but it all kind of led to this feeling of being an observer on the outside.

Poverty is very good in poems but very bad in the house; very good in maxims and sermons but very bad in practical life.

Now, instead of loading up your jalopy and heading for California, you take a second, badly paid job; 'The Grapes of Wrath' has turned into 'Nickel and Dimed.'

Some people don't know why they have pride in something that they do.

Sometimes when people talk about me in fashion, I feel - I don't want to say uncomfortable, but I still don't believe that I'm in 'fashion.'

The difference between guilt and shame is very clear--in theory. We feel guilty for what we do. We feel shame for what we are. A person feels guilt because he did something wrong. A person feels shame because he is something wrong. We may feel guilty because we lied to our mother. We may feel shame because we are not the person our mother wanted us to be.

I come home that morning, after I been fired, and stood outside my house with my new work shoes on. The shoes my mama paid a month's worth a light bill for. I guess that's when I understood what shame was and the color of it too. Shame ain't black, like dirt, like I always thought it was. Shame be the color of a new white uniform your mother ironed all night to pay for, white without a smudge or a speck a work-dirt on it.

Man must choose either of the two courses, the upward or the downward; but as he has the brute in him, he will more easily choose the downward course than the upward, especially when the downward course is presented to him in a beautiful garb. Man easily capitulates when sin is presented in the garb of virtue.

How much of fashion is fueled by insecurity - for better or worse?

One of the things that struck me when I came to the U.S. was discovering American poverty.

If you go too far down the rabbit hole of what people think about you, it can change everything about who you are.

I couldn't get any jobs, and when that happens, you get so humble it's disgusting. I didn't feel like a man anymore -- I felt really creepy. I was bumping into walls and saying, Excuse me.

A character is defined by the kinds of challenges he cannot walk away from. And by those he has walked away from that cause him remorse.

The Negro pays for what he wants and begs for what he needs.

You're just too poor to get rich.

Emotional appeals about working families trying to get by on $4.25 an hour are hard to resist.

I am ashamed of my master and not of my servitude.

We try to do what's right, or rather what other say is right. But sometimes, when that goes against who we are...you have to choose.

My parents always put more of an emphasis on who I was as opposed to what I achieved. They were never like, "You won that! You did this!" It was all about, "You've got a good heart. You're a good friend. You're a good daughter." So that other stuff in no way defines my sense of self.

Complaint is poverty.

I had consumed a lot of American culture, but I was not quite prepared for the reality of American poverty.

Poverty is what we call the extremes at the bottom.

I still can't understand why anyone cares about what I do or what I say.

He knew that conscience was chiefly fear of society or fear of oneself.

We are living in the richest country in the history of the world, yet we have the highest rate of childhood poverty of almost any major country and millions of people are struggling to put food on the table. It is my absolute conviction that everyone in this country deserves a minimum standard of living and we've got to go forward in the fight to make that happen.