I may not know the weight of those things, but I could feel the weight of that one, so I kept it to myself. You know that things aren't going well for you when you can't even tell people the simplest fact about your life, just because they'll presume you're asking them to feel sorry for you. I suppose it's why you feel so far away from everyone, in the end; anything you can think of to tell them just ends up making them feel terrible.

When you're unhappy, I guess everything in the world - reading, eating, sleeping - has something buried somewhere inside it that just makes you unhappier.

I have learned things from the game. Much of my knowledge of locations in Britain and Europe comes not from school, but from away games or the sports pages, and hooliganism has given me both a taste for sociology and a degree of fieldwork experience. I have learned the value of investing time and emotion in things I cannot control, and of belonging to a community whose aspirations I share completely and uncritically.

This thing about looking for someone less different... It only really worked, he realized, if you were convinced that being you wasn't so bad in the first place.

The point is you keep going. You want to. So all the things that make you want to are the point.

There are many differences between a baby and an I-Pod. And one of the biggest is, no ones going to mug you for your baby.

I had forgotten that Jess felt about long words the way that racists feel about black people: She hated them, and wanted to send them back from where they came from.