You'll remember someone who broke your heart, and you'll think to yourself, 'Oh yes, I remember how that feels.' But you can't.

You had to live in your own bubble. You couldn't force your way into someone else's, because then it wouldn't be a bubble any more.

...I feel as though I made a face and the wind changed, and now I have to go through life grimacing in this horrible way.

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.

The outward manifestations of an inner combustion are never very directed.

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.

There isn't so much to be afraid of, out there. I can remember thinking it was funny to find that out, on the last night of my life; I'd spent the rest of it being afraid of everything.