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2bfeb95
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But he was a connoisseur of the if-only, and so they did travel. They travelled in the past-conditional.
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Julian Barnes |
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c03daf2
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Arthur was frequently baffled by the complacency with which people went on with what they insouciantly called their lives, as if both the word and the thing made perfect sense to them.
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meaning
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Julian Barnes |
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c282046
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Playing Cupid, I should have you know, isn't just a matter of flying around Arcadia and feeling your tiny winkle throb when the lovers finally kiss. It's to do with timetables and street maps, cinema times and menus, money and organisation. You have to be both jaunty cheerleader and lithe psychiatrist. You require the binary skill of being absent when present, and present when absent.
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Julian Barnes |
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2f770d8
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One way of legitimising coincidences, of course, is to call them ironies. That
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Julian Barnes |
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8b0667a
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We live with such easy assumptions, don't we? For instance, that memory equals events plus time. But it's all much odder than this. Who was it said that memory is what we thought we'd forgotten? And it ought to be obvious to us that time doesn't act as a fixative, rather as a solvent. But it's not convenient--it's not useful--to believe this; it doesn't help us get on with our lives; so we ignore it.
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Julian Barnes |
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1584dbe
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You got your cheese, I hope? You won't mind a word of advice? Eat it. Don't put it in a plastic bag in the fridge and save it for visitors; before you know where you are it'll have swollen to three times its size and smell like a chemical factory. You'll open the bag and be putting your face into a bad marriage.
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Julian Barnes |
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9876768
|
what you end up remembering isn't always the same as what you have witnessed.
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Julian Barnes |
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df31a8c
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From time to time, I open a newspaper. Things seem to be proceeding at a dizzy rate. We are dancing not on the edge of a volcano, but on the wooden seat of a latrine, and it seems to me more than a touch rotten. Soon society will go plummeting down and drown in nineteen centuries of shit. There'll be quite a lot of shouting.
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Julian Barnes |
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1f6bdbc
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He sometimes asked himself a question about life. Which are truer, the happy memories, or the unhappy ones? He decided, eventually, that the question was unanswerable.
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memories
life
truth
unanswerable
unhappy-memories
the-only-story
julian-barnes
memory
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Julian Barnes |
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5844ee4
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My name is Stuart, and I remember everything.
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Julian Barnes |
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dbc933f
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The final tormenting, unanswerable question: what is 'success' in mourning?
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mourning
grief
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Julian Barnes |
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4381fa9
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Afternoon sex was the best sex of all, Ann thought. Morning sex she'd had enough of in her time: usually it meant, 'Sorry about last night but here it is anyway'; and sometimes it meant, 'This'll make sure you don't forget me today'; but neither attitude charmed her. Evening sex was, well, your basic sex, wasn't it? It was the sex which could vary from enveloping happiness via sleepily given consent to an edgy, 'Look, this is what we came t..
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sex
morning
evening
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Julian Barnes |
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020b1e9
|
Marriage is the only adventure open to the cowardly. Gossip briefly wondered if gossip had invented the whole story, but gossip decided that the worst interpretation of events was usually the safest and, in the end, the truest. Like most of his life's writing, the play was concerned with love. and as in his life, so in his writing: love did not work. Love might or might not provoke kindness, gratify vanity and clear the skin, but it did not..
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Julian Barnes |
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69e086e
|
And does history repeat itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce?No, that's too grand, too considered a process. 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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212a706
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The way, the truth and the life. You go on your way through life telling the truth.
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Julian Barnes |
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c878b38
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And this is how I would remember it all, if I could. But I can't.
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Julian Barnes |
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bff06f9
|
My philosopher friend, who gazed on life and decided that any responsible, thinking individual should have the right to reject this gift that had never been asked for--and whose noble gesture reemphasised with each passing decade the compromise and littleness that most lives consist of. 'Most lives': my life.
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Julian Barnes |
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94f6a63
|
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. At
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Julian Barnes |
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2c2da4f
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I was also, slowly, to learn that there were painters whom you grew out of (like the Pre-Raphaelites); painters you grew into (Chardin); painters towards whom you had a lifelong, sighing indifference (Greuze); painters you suddenly became aware of after years of unnoticing (Liotard, Hammershoi, Cassatt, Vallotton); painters assuredly great but to whom your response was always a bit negligent (Rubens); and painters who would, whatever age yo..
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Julian Barnes |
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3b29181
|
Flaubert believed that it was impossible to explain one art form in terms of another, and that great paintings required no words of explanation. Braque thought the ideal state would be reached when we said nothing at all in front of a painting. But we are very far from reaching that state. We remain incorrigibly verbal creatures who love to explain things, to form opinions, to argue. Put us in front of a picture and we chatter, each in our ..
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Julian Barnes |
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8098ef5
|
But that was too simple: the idea of a man split into two by a dividing axe. Better: a man crushed into a hundred pieces of rubble, vainly trying to remember how they--he--had once fitted together. --
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Julian Barnes |
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3174fe1
|
Constantly he went back over the evidence of his memories.
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Julian Barnes |
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bf97b1b
|
Louise Colet was a proto-feminist who committed the sin of wanting to make someone else happy.
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Julian Barnes |
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0ab0df6
|
Do you know what Nabokov said about adultery in his lecture on Madame Bovary? He said it was 'a most conventional way to rise above the conventional'.
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Julian Barnes |
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fc353a0
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Nobody stops to think about the world anymore. We live in a world where they make children pay to see the fish eat. Nowadays even fish are exploited, she thought. Exploited, and then poisoned. The ocean out there is filling up with poison. The fish will die too
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Julian Barnes |
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f53ce36
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Medicine then must have been such an exciting, desperate, violent business; nowadays it is all pills and bureaucracy.
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Julian Barnes |
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39ccbbc
|
The verdict of the coroner's inquest had been that Adrian Finn (22) had killed himself 'while the balance of his mind was disturbed.' I remember how angry that conventional phrase made me: I would have sworn on oath that Adrian's was the one mind which would never lose its balance. But in the law's view, if you killed yourself you were by definition mad, at least at the time you were committing the act. The law, and society, and religion al..
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suicide
philosophy
suicide-note
the-sense-of-an-ending
law
society
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Julian Barnes |
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78746b6
|
You like this stuff?' she asked neutrally. 'Good to dance to,' I replied, a little defensively. 'Do you dance to it? Here? In your room? By yourself?' 'No, not really.' Though of course I did.
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Julian Barnes |
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be81e80
|
Whereas most of us, I suspect, do the opposite: we make an instinctive decision, then build up an infrastructure of reasoning to justify it. And call the result common sense.
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Julian Barnes |
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bf93e00
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Why does anything left-wing have to be trendy before it's read, and by the time it's trendy it's already a force for conservatism?
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Julian Barnes |
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cb1f143
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atheism, which is mere emptiness and too depressing for words, and leads to socialism.
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Julian Barnes |
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c6ad214
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How attracted to one another we had been; how light she felt on my lap; how exciting it always was; how, even though we weren't having "full sex," all the elements of it--the lust, the tenderness, the candour, the trust--were there anyway. And how part of me hadn't minded not "going the whole way"...This acceptance of less than others had was also due to fear, of course: fear of pregnancy, fear of saying or doing the wrong thing, fear of an..
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Julian Barnes |
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203ce39
|
If all your responses to a book have already been duplicated and expanded upon by a professional critic, then what point is there to your reading? Only that it's yours.
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Julian Barnes |
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5219646
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Apart from these parental physical jerks, he did not train his body; he merely inhabited it. A friend had once shown what he called gymnastics for the intelligentsia. You took a box of matches and threw its contents on the floor, then bent down and picked them up, one by one. The first time he tried it himself, he lost patience and stuffed all the matches back in handfuls. He persevered, but the next time, just as he was bending down, the t..
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Julian Barnes |
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bb0b4a7
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Compliments of the season to you, and may the acid rain fall on your joint and anointed heads.
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Julian Barnes |
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430feb7
|
I found myself comparing my life against Adrian's. 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 hap..
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Julian Barnes |
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8a0c4df
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In truth, he was just another man, behaving as men did in books, and she was just another woman for believing otherwise.
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Julian Barnes |
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37f4607
|
Byt' russkim chelovekom - znachit byt' pessimistom; byt' sovetskim chelovekom - znachit byt' optimistom. Poetomu vyrazhenie "Sovetskaia Rossiia" vnutrenne protivorechivo."
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Julian Barnes |
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1ba654a
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At a social event she and I would normally have attended together, an acquaintance came up and said to me, simply, "There's someone missing." That felt correct, in both senses."
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Julian Barnes |
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bc6576a
|
Look what she has lost, now that she has lost life. Her body, her spirit; her radiant curiosity about life. At times it feels as if life itself is the greatest loser, the true bereaved party, because it is no longer subjected to that radiant curiosity of hers.
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Julian Barnes |
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e2281a0
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But that was the nature of relationships: there always seemed to be an imbalance of one sort of another. And it was fine to plan an emotional strategy, but another thing when the ground opened up in front of you, and your defending troops toppled into a ravine which hadn't been marked on the map until a few seconds previously.
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Julian Barnes |
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95a76fb
|
Zhran Gryzh sh khwb khr mykhrd : mn admy bwdm khh byd bh w psht khrd. gr zndgy szy `ml r mydhd, mn szwr jtnb bwdm...
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Julian Barnes |
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a26313e
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Sabia ya que solo las viejas palabras servian: muerte, congoja, tristeza, pesar, sufrimiento. Nada moderadamente evasivo o medicinal. La afliccion es un estado humano, no medico, y aunque haya pildoras que nos ayuden a olvidarla - y todo lo demas -, no hay pastillas que la curen. Los afligidos no estan deprimidos, sino solo debidamente, adecuada, matematicamente tristes.
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mourning
sadness
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Julian Barnes |
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97b3ca2
|
Religion decays, the icon remains; a narrative is forgotten, yet its representation still magnetizes (the ignorant eye triumphs - how galling for the informed eye).
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Julian Barnes |