Life & Wisdom Quote by Nick Hornby

Hornby’s line smuggles empathy into a sentence that initially sounds like resignation. “Everything’s complicated” is the shrug of a realist, but the sting is in what follows: even the emotions we treat as self-evident - “bleakness or sadness” - aren’t simple, clean, or even honest with us. He’s pushing back on the cultural habit of flattening pain into a single, legible mood, the kind you can caption, playlist, and move on from. The point isn’t that sadness is deep; it’s that sadness is messy. It carries mixed motives, contradictory memories, tiny consolations, petty resentments, and sometimes a perverse comfort in staying put.

The phrase “flat in their bleakness” is doing sly work. It names the way depression can feel like a featureless plain: no plot, no texture, just gray. Hornby undercuts that perceived flatness by insisting there’s structure underneath, even when the mind can’t access it. That’s a very Hornby move: he writes from inside ordinary disappointment and refuses the romantic narrative that suffering automatically ennobles. Complexity here isn’t a halo; it’s a fact of living with yourself.

Contextually, it sits neatly in Hornby’s broader project - novels and criticism that treat taste, relationships, and self-image as arenas where people want clean explanations and keep failing to get them. The intent is almost corrective: don’t trust the first story your feelings tell you, especially the bleak one.