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088822e
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I love you.' For a start, we'd better put these words on a high shelf; in a square box behind glass which we have to break with our elbow; in the bank. We shouldn't leave them lying around the house like a tube of vitamin C. If the words come too easily to hand, we'll use them without thought; we won't be able to resist. Oh, we say we won't, but we will. We'll get drunk, or lonely, or - likeliest of all - plain damn hopeful, and there are t..
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Julian Barnes |
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3833e7f
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Voleo bih da je zivot kao bankarstvo', rekao sam. 'Ne mislim doslovno. Ima tu vrlo komplikovanih stvari. Ali, na kraju sve shvatis ako se samo potrudis. Ili uvek postoji negde neko ko se razume, pa makar i naknadno, kad je vec kasno. Nevolja sa zivotom, kako se meni cini, jeste da moze vec za sve da bude kasno, a da ti ipak i dalje nista ne shvatas.
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Julian Barnes |
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12cfc1e
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Back in 'my day' - though I didn't claim ownership of it at the time, this is what used to happen: you met a girl, you were attracted to her, you tried to ingratiate yourself, you would invite her to a couple of social events - for instance the pub - and then ask her out on her own, then again, and after a goodnight kiss of variable heat, you were somehow, officially, 'going out' with her. Only when you were semi-publicly committed did you ..
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Julian Barnes |
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f5a5fd9
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Games are for childhood, and sometimes I think I lost my childhood young.
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Julian Barnes |
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ff69680
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There is violence in this supposedly tender heart of mine.
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violence
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Julian Barnes |
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0b60f27
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Blame someone else, that's always your first instinct. And if you can't blame someone else, then start claiming the problem isn't a problem anyway. Rewrite the rules, shift the goalposts.
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Julian Barnes |
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c19c87f
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Love means never having to say you're sorry (on the contrary, it frequently means doing just precisely that).
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Julian Barnes |
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0bafd04
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love might or might not promote kindness, gratify vanity, and clear the skin, but it did not lead to happiness; there was always an inequality of feeling or intention present. such was love's nature. of course, it 'worked' in the sense that it caused life's profoundest emotions, made him fresh as a spring's linden-blossom and broke him like a traitor on the wheel.
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Julian Barnes |
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81ad40d
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The ability to see and examine himself; the ability to make moral decisions and act on them; the mental and physical courage of his suicide. "He took his own life" is the phrase; but Adrian also took charge of his own life, he took command of it, he took it in his hands--and then out of them. How few of us--we that remain--can say that we have done the same? We muddle along, we let life happen to us, we gradually build up a store of memorie..
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Julian Barnes |
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3213a0a
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To die from 'a draining away of one's strength caused by extreme old age' was in Montaigne's day a 'rare, singular and extraordinary death.' Nowadays we assume it as our right.
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Julian Barnes |
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ac37ad9
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It had seemed to us philosophically self-evident that suicide was every free person's right: a logical act when faced with terminal illness or senility; a heroic one when faced with torture or the avoidable deaths of others; a glamorous one in the fury of disappointed love (see: Great Literature).
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Julian Barnes |
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11f8ab8
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It seemed to me that we ought occasionally to be reminded of instability beneath our feet.
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Julian Barnes |
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ddc5baf
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The thing I remember from the Letters Page in those antique days was the way the OBs signed off. There was Yours faithfully, Yours sincerely, and I have the honour to be, sir, your obedient servant. But the ones I always looked for - and which I took to be the true sign of an Old Bastard - simply ended like this: And then the newspaper drew even more attention to the sign-off by printing it: I used to muse about that. What did it me..
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Julian Barnes |
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ab93d93
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History just burps, and we taste again that raw-onion sandwich it swallowed centuries ago.
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Julian Barnes |
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e1f4d67
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You are in love, at a point where pride and apprehension scuffle within you. Part of you wants time to slow down: for this, you say to yourself, is the best period of your whole life. I am in love, I want to savour it, study it, lie around in languor with it; may today last forever. This is your poetical side. However, there is also your prose side, which urges time not to slow down but hurry up. How do you know this is love, your prose sid..
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Julian Barnes |
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0128f47
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Well, in one sense, I can't know what it is that I don't know. That's philosophically self-evident.
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Julian Barnes |
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f460f9a
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Not that this let me off the hook. My younger self had come back to shock my older self with what that self had been, or was, or was sometimes capable of being. And only recently I'd been going on about how the witnesses to our lives decrease, and with them our essential corroboration. Now I had some all too unwelcome corroboration of what I was, or had been. If only this had been the document Veronica had set light to.
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Julian Barnes |
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4091a10
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I'd ban coincidences, if I were a dictator of fiction. Well, perhaps not entirely. Coincidences would be permitted in the picaresque; that's where they belong. Go on, take them: let
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Julian Barnes |
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8854adb
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But he would never join their number, never be a member of the smiling retinue of former lovers. He considered that sort of behavior rather beastly, in fact immoral. He refused to be turned from a lover into a dear friend. He was uninterested in that transition.
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Julian Barnes |
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dc4813d
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That's what it feels like, anyway. Life isn't just addition and subtraction. There's also the accumulation, the multiplication, of loss, of failure.
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Julian Barnes |
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face1e7
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Again, I must stress that this is my reading now of what happened then. Or rather, my memory now of my reading then of what was happening at the time.
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Julian Barnes |
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6e26479
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as for knowing your own mind, this seemed a bewildering process. How could you know your own mind without using your mind to discover your mind in the first place?
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Julian Barnes |
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7c11e41
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An English silence--one in which all the unspoken words are perfectly understood by both parties--prevailed. I got into my bed and wept. The matter was never referred to again.
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Julian Barnes |
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c2d65c4
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One feeling at least grows stronger in me with each year that passes--a longing to see the cranes. At this time of year I stand on a hill and watch the sky. Today they did not come. There were only wild geese. Geese would be beautiful if cranes did not exist.
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Julian Barnes |
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c0398c5
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She sees only what's gone, I see only what's stayed the same. Her hair is no longer halfway down her back or pulled up in a French pleat; nowadays it is cut close to her skull and the grey is allowed to show. Those peasanty frocks she used to wear have given way to cardigans and well-cut trousers. Some of the freckles I once loved are now closer to liver spots. But it's still the eyes we look at, isn't it? That's where we found the other pe..
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Julian Barnes |
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d5cba66
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But the moment I realized that Pomiane was not just sympathetic but deeply on my side came in his recipe for Boeuf a la Ficelle (top rump suspended in boiling water by a string). When it is done, you are told to: 'Lift the beef from the saucepan and remove the string. The meat is grey outside and not very appetizing. At this moment you may feel a little depressed.' Isn't that one of the most cheering and pedant-friendly lines a cook ever wr..
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Julian Barnes |
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9a71be4
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Until I met Annick I'd always been certain that the edgy cynicism and disbelief in which I dealt, plus a cowed trust in the word of any imaginative writer, were the only tools for the painful, wrenching extraction of truths from the surrounding quartz of hypocrisy and deceit. The pursuit of truth had always seemed something combative. Now, not exactly in a flash, but over a few weeks, I wondered if it weren't something both higher - above t..
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Julian Barnes |
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ccebaa2
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You realize that tough love is also tough on the lover.
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Julian Barnes |
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e97a4d7
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Io so una cosa per certo: che un tempo oggettivo esiste, ma che esiste anche quello soggettivo, quello che si porta sull'interno polso, proprio accanto alle pulsazioni cardiache. E questo tempo personale, che e poi anche quello autentico, si misura in funzione del nostro rapporto con i ricordi.
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tempo
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Julian Barnes |
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0fa11aa
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between the principle and its implementation often lay some anguish.
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Julian Barnes |
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2873309
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Part of love is preparing for death... Afterwards comes the madness. And then the loneliness... [People say] you'll come out of it... And you do come out of it, that's true. But you don't come out of it like a train coming out of a tunnel, bursting through the Downs into sunshine and that swift, rattling descent to the Channel; you come out of it as a gull comes out of an oil slick; you are tarred and feathered for life.
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Julian Barnes |
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b8cf946
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Epeide den mporeite na ta bgalete pera khoris to oneiro.
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Julian Barnes |
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d6fa19e
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Sejarah bukanlah apa yang terjadi. Sejarah hanyalah apa yang dituturkan sejarawan kepada kita.
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Julian Barnes |
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99d1717
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There is the question of loneliness. But again, this is not how you imagined it (if you had ever tried to imagine it). There are two essential kinds of loneliness: that of not having found someone to love, and that of having been deprived of the one you did love. The first kind is worse.
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Julian Barnes |
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420ae12
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What did I care about saving the world if the world couldn't, wouldn't, save her?
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Julian Barnes |
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1968ff5
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And sometimes all that happened was that the misleading old euphemisms were replaced by the misleading new cliches.
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Julian Barnes |
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f4e6495
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We live in time--it holds us and moulds us--but I've never felt I understood it very well. And I'm not referring to theories about how it bends and doubles back, or may exist elsewhere in parallel versions. No, I mean ordinary, everyday time, which clocks and watches assure us passes regularly: tick-tock, click-clock. Is there anything more plausible than a second hand?
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Julian Barnes |
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9a131f0
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I must confess that in all the times I read Madame Bovary, I never noticed the heroine's rainbow eyes. Should I have? Would you? Was I perhaps too busy noticing things that Dr Starkie was missing (though what they might have been I can't for the moment think)? Put it another way: is there a perfect reader somewhere, a total reader? Does Dr Starkie's reading of Madame Bovary contain all the responses which I have when I read the book, and th..
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Julian Barnes |
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d6c57d0
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Noah couldn't do anything without first wondering what He would think. Now that's no way to go on. Always looking over your shoulder for approval - it's not adult, is it?
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Julian Barnes |
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94f448d
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Major General Anders later reflected: I think it was the Earthrise that really kind of got everybody in the solar plexus ... We were looking back at our planet, the place where we evolved. Our Earth was quite colorful, pretty and delicate compared to the very rough, rugged, beat-up, even boring lunar surface. I think it struck everybody that here we'd come 240,000 miles to see the Moon and it was the Earth that was really worth looking at.
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Julian Barnes |
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b7a42e4
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Then, at some point, sooner or later, for this reason or that, one of them is taken away. And what is taken away is greater than the sum of what was there. This may not be mathematically possible; but it is emotionally possible.
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Julian Barnes |
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671083d
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Maybe women are more in touch with the world. He said what did I mean, and I said, well, everything's connected, isn't it, and women are more closely connected to all the cycles of nature and birth and rebirth on the planet than men, who are only impregnators after all when it comes down to it, and if women are in tune with the planet then maybe if terrible things are going on up in the north, things which threaten the whole existence of th..
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Julian Barnes |
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1b5c0ac
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But if you're very clever, I think there's something that can unhinge you if you're not careful.
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Julian Barnes |
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86871f7
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The constant tug between nature and civilization is what keeps on our toes. Though of course, that did rather beg the question of how you defined nature and how you defined civilization.
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nature
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Julian Barnes |