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So I re-read High Fidelity, well, just the parts where I underlined the last time I read it. I feel compelled to record in this journal “The Best of HF”. All the clever turn of phrases is as relevant as ever. I agree wholeheartedly with this New Yorker reviewer who said: “Hornby has established himself… as a maestro of the male confessional.” I guess the brutally honest, always hilarious, sometimes poignant, exposé of the male psyche makes men (and sometimes women too – it certain strikes a chord in my heart!) smile in recognition while at the same time leaving them feeling incredibly vulnerable.

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The perfect match, if you ask me, is between the Cosmo woman and the fourteen-year-old boy.

But I still felt a fraud. I was like all those people who suddenly shaved their heads and said they’ve always been punks, they’d been punks before punk was even thought of.

… for every single minute I felt as though I was standing on a dangerously narrow ledge… there was no room to stretch out and relax… I worried that I was never ever going to be able to say anything interesting or amusing to her about anything at all.

What came first – the music of the misery? Did I listen to music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to music? Do all those records turn you a melancholy person?

They’ve been listening to the sad songs longer than they’ve been living the unhappy lives.

My genius, if you can call it that, is to combine a whole load of averageness into one compact frame… lots of blokes have impeccable music taste but don’t read, lots of blokes read but are really fat, lots of blokes are sympathetic to feminism but have stupid beards, lots of blokes have a Woody Allen sense of humor but look like Woody Allen… if I do OK with women, it’s not because of the virtues I have, but because of the shadows I don’t have.

Tragic. I’m glad I learned to stay home and sulk.

Unless you are so paranoid about loss that you choose someone unlossable.

It’s brilliant, being depressed; you can behave as badly as you like.

I’m very good at the past. It’s the present I can’t understand.

… a let’s-be-grown-up-about-life’s-imperfectibility sort of conversation, an abstract, adult analysis.

I could see her losing interest in me, so I worked like mad to get that interest back, and when I got it back, I lost interest in her all over again.

I’m unhappy because she doesn’t want me; if I can convince myself that she does want me a bit, then I’ll be OK again; because then I won’t want her, and I can get on with looking for someone else.

I cut corners and trim edges and widen the margins and speak, in big letters to make it all look a bit more detailed than it really is… I hint at a deep ocean of melancholy just below the surface.

This, really, is the bottom line, the chief attraction of the opposite sex for all of us, old and young, men and women: we need someone to save us from the sympathetic smiles in the Sunday-night cinema queue, someone who stop us from falling down into the pit where the permanently single live with their mums and dads… I’d rather stay in for the rest of my life than attract that kind of attention.

A snob obscurantist.

Maybe we all live life at too high a pitch, those of us who absorb emotional things all day, and as a consequence we can never feel merely content: we have to be unhappy, or ecstatically, head-over-heels happy, and those states are difficult to achieve within a stable, solid relationship.

We’re all cynics and romantics, sometimes simultaneously…

… life’s four categories – happily coupled, unhappily coupled, single, and desperate.

“It’s just that most of the time you can’t be bothered… you just don’t do anything. You get lost in your head, and you sit around thinking instead of getting on with something, and most of the time yo think rubbish. You always seem to miss what’s really happening.”

“Something more than waiting for life to change and keeping your options open… you will be lying on your deathbed, dying of some smoking-related disease, and you’ll be thinking, ‘well, at least I’ve kept my options open. At least I never ended up doing something I couldn’t back out of.’ And all the time you’re keeping your options open, you’re closing them off.”

She’s talking about detail, clutter, the stuff that stops you from floating away.

It’s just as likely to be the look of benevolent indulgence that a mother gives a toddler, or a look of amused exasperation, even a look of pained concern.

It’s not what you like but what you’re like that’s important.

… and they have to fight to get there, and perhaps as a consequence they do not get the feeling that real life is going on elsewhere. I don’t even feel as if I’m the center of my own world, so how am I supposed to feel as though I’m the center of anyone else’s?

… because I know I’m stuck, and I don’t like it. It would be nicer, in some ways, if I wasn’t so bound to her; it would be nicer if those sweet possibilities, that dreamy anticipation you have when you’re fifteen or twenty or twenty-five, even, and you know that the most perfect person in the world might walk into your shop of office or friend’s party at any moment… But it’s all gone, I think, and that’s enough to make anyone cross.

… textbook symptoms of a crush: nervous stomach, long periods of daydreaming, an inability to remember what she looks like… I am doing the usual thing – imaging in tiny detail the entire course of the relationship… until suddenly I realized that there’s nothing left to actually, like, happen. I’ve done it all, lived through the whole relationship in my head. I’ve watched the film on fast-forward; I know the whole plot, the ending, all the good bit. Now I’ve got to rewind and watch it all over again in real time, and where’s fun in that?

… I suddenly saw it was the opposite: that if you got married to the someone you know you love, and you sort yourself out, it frees you up for other things.