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High Fidelity

Book by Nick Hornby · 5 quotes · Ifs, People, Knows

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High Fidelity Quotes

“Read any women's magazine and you'll see the same complaint over and over again: men - those little boys ten or twenty or thirty years on - are hopeless in bed. They are not interested in "foreplay"; they have no desire to stimulate the erogenous zones of the opposite sex; they are selfish, greedy, clumsy, unsophisticated. These complaints, you can't help feeling, are ironic. Back then, all we wanted was foreplay, and girls weren't interested. They didn't want to be touched, caressed, stimulated, aroused; in fact, they used to thump us if we tried. It's not really very suprising, then, that we're not much good at all that. We spent two or three long and extremely formative years being told very forcibly not even to think about it. Between the ages of fourteen and twenty-four, foreplay changes from being something that boys want to do and girls don't, to something that women want and men can't be bothered with. (Or so they say. Me, I like foreplay - mostly because the times when all I wanted to do was touch are alarmingly fresh in my mind.) The perfect match, if you ask me, is between the Cosmo woman and the fourteen-year-old boy.”

“I'm happy being a bloke, I think, but sometimes I'm not happy being a bloke in the late-twentieth century. Sometimes I'd rather be my dad. He never had to worry about delivering the goods, because he never knew that there were any goods to deliver; he never had to worry about how he ranked in my mother's all-time hot one hundred, because he was first and last on the list. Wouldn't it be great if you could talk about this sort of thing with your father? One day, maybe, I'll try. "Dad, did you ever have to worry about the female orgasm in either it's clitoral or its (possibly mythical) vaginal form? Do you, in fact, know what the female organism is? What about the G-spot? What did 'good in bed' mean in the 1955, if it meant anything at all? When was oral sex imported to Britain? Do you envy me my sex life, or does it all look like terribly hard work to you?”

“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 can stop us from falling down into the pit where the permanently single live with their mums and dads.”