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78e0746
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Heroes become traitors, traitors become martyrs.
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Julian Barnes |
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dfb7752
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Posterity will jump to conclusions: that is its nature.
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Julian Barnes |
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f83150a
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strikes me that this may be one of the differences between youth and age: when we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old, we invent different pasts for others.
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Julian Barnes |
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07e765c
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Freedom consists of conforming to the will of the majority.
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Julian Barnes |
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bbaa19f
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He had entered some state of grace--but one that did not exclude. He made you feel you were his co-thinker, even if you said nothing.
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Julian Barnes |
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146e243
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A question from the floor: are there tribes whose lexicon lacks the words 'I love you'? Or have they all died out.
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Julian Barnes |
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5e2f361
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Had my life increased, or merely added to itself? This was the question Adrian's fragment set off in me. There had been addition--and subtraction--in my life, but how much multiplication? And this gave me a sense of unease, of unrest.
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Julian Barnes |
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fdbd9d2
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Perhaps I just feel safer with the history that's been more or less agreed upon.
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Julian Barnes |
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20d136e
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as the witnesses to your life diminish, there is less corroboration, and therefore less certainty, as to what you are or have been. Even if you have assiduously kept records--in words, sound, pictures--you may find that you have attended to the wrong kind of record-keeping. What was the line Adrian used to quote? "History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation."
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Julian Barnes |
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874c10a
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the history that happens underneath our noses ought to be the clearest, and yet it's the most deliquescent. We live in time, it bounds us and defines us, and time is supposed to measure history, isn't it? But if we can't understand time, can't grasp its mysteries of pace and progress, what chance do we have with history--even our own small, personal, largely undocumented piece of it?
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Julian Barnes |
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f824575
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The question of subjective versus objective interpretation, the fact that we need to know the history of the historian in order to understand the version that is being put in front of us.
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Julian Barnes |
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d06bae6
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Ragana, pagalvojau. Jeigu pasaulyje yra moteris, kuria gali isimyleti ir vis tiek manyti, kad gyvenimo verta atsisakyti, tai toji moteris yra Veronika.
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Julian Barnes |
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14304db
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the liver of the bear is poisonous - the only part of any quadruped known to be so.
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Julian Barnes |
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ea3b5c2
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both her secret life and her despair lay in the same inner chamber of her heart, inaccessible to me.
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Julian Barnes |
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445c2d3
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The one thing that is very good in life today is death.
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Julian Barnes |
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96582f6
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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. Did I think Adrian's action an implied
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Julian Barnes |
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4cef8d8
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I had a friend who trained as a lawyer, then became disenchanted and never practiced. He told me that the one benefit of those wasted years was that he no longer feared either the law or lawyers.
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Julian Barnes |
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c128255
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I thought of writing books myself once. I had the ideas; I even made notes. But I was a doctor, married with children. You can only do one thing well: Flaubert knew that.
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Julian Barnes |
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19b55ae
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Ah, the rheumy-eyed grandpa on the terraces inducting the lad into the mysteries of soccer: how to loathe people wearing different coloured shirts, how to feign injury, how to blow your snot onto the pitch--See, son, you press hard on one nostril to close it, and explode the green stuff out of the other. How to be vain and overpaid and have your best years behind you before you've even understood what life's about. Oh yes, I look forward to..
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Julian Barnes |
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79ad7cb
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The question of accumulation," Adrian had written. You put money on a horse, it wins, and your winnings go on to the next horse in the next race, and so on. Your winnings accumulate. But do your losses? Not at the racetrack--there, you just lose your original stake. But in life? Perhaps here different rules apply. You bet on a relationship, it fails; you go on to the next relationship, it fails too: and maybe what you lose is not two simple..
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Julian Barnes |
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36f1440
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The school was in central London, and each day we travelled up to it from our separate boroughs, passing from one system of control to another. Back then, things were plainer: less money, no electronic devices, little fashion tyranny, no girlfriends. There was nothing to distract us from our human and filial duty, which was to study, pass exams, use those qualifications to find a job, and then put together a way of life unthreateningly full..
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Julian Barnes |
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08206ca
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History isn't the lies of the victors, as I once glibly assured Old Joe Hunt; I know that now. It's more the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious nor defeated.
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Julian Barnes |
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dc5af6b
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These different kinds of truthfulness will be fully apparent to the young writer, and their joining together a matter of anxiety. For the older writer, memory and the imagination begin to seem less and less distinguishable. This is not because the imagined world is really much closer to the writer's life than he or she cares to admit (a common error among those who anatomize fiction) but for exactly the opposite reason: that memory itself c..
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Julian Barnes |
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ccc805c
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You find yourself repeating, "They grow up so quickly, don't they?" when all you really mean is: time goes faster for me nowadays."
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Julian Barnes |
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3b13911
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Try as I could--which wasn't very hard--I rarely ended up fantasising a markedly different life from the one that has been mine. I don't think this is complacency; it's more likely a lack of imagination, or ambition, or something.
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Julian Barnes |
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ce485a7
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Isn't growing up a necessary process of losing one's innocence? Maybe, maybe not. But the trouble with life is, you rarely know when that loss is going to happen, do you? And how it will be, afterwards.
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Julian Barnes |
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46c41a1
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And I thought of a cresting wave of water, lit by a moon, rushing past and vanishing upstream, pursued by a band of yelping students whose torchbeams criss-crossed in the dark. There is accumulation. There is responsibility. And beyond these, there is unrest. There is great unrest.
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Julian Barnes |
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85f7977
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This movement to which he had dedicated his life could not be snuffed out by a few opportunists, a sackful of dollars and a cunt in the Kremlin. It was as old and as strong as the human spirit itself. It would come back, with fresh vigour, soon, very soon. It might have a different name, a different banner. But men and women would always want to walk that path, that tricky uphill path across the river of stones and through the damp cloud, b..
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Julian Barnes |
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bbf023c
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I'd read somewhere that if you want to make people pay attention to what you're saying, you don't raise your voice but lower it: this is what really commands attention.
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Julian Barnes |
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a5c244b
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In those days, we imagined ourselves as being kept in some kind of holding pen, waiting to be released into our lives. And when that moment came, our lives--and time itself--would speed up. How were we to know that our lives had in any case begun, that some advantage had already been gained, some damage already inflicted? Also, that our release would only be into a larger holding pen, whose boundaries would be at first undiscernible.
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Julian Barnes |
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a84c0c9
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What is History? Any thoughts, Webster?'
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Julian Barnes |
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84fa21d
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We're leaving," I told her one July afternoon. "We? You and I? Where are we going, young Master Paul? Do you have your belongings tied up in a red-spotted handkerchief on a stick?" --
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humor
dialogue
the-only-story
julian-barnes
teasing
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Julian Barnes |
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69eb73c
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poetry's packaged as a late-night slot, a quote minority taste unquote, like water-skiing or goat-fucking or something.
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Julian Barnes |
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3ce6e71
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ay chyzy bwrpdhyrtr z `qrbh thnyh shm wjwd dd? w bwjwdyn, khwchkhtryn ldht y drdy khfy st khh n`Tfpdhyry zmn r bhmn bymwzd.
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Julian Barnes |
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e0ac5a0
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When people say, "She's a good-looking woman," they usually mean, "She used to be a good-looking woman." But when I say that about Margaret, I mean it. She thinks--she knows--that she's changed, and she has; though less to me than to anybody else. Naturally, I can't speak for the restaurant manager. But I'd put it like this: 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 u..
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Julian Barnes |
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ca17b18
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If you're an old geezer in his rocker on the porch, you don't play basketball with the kids. Old geezers don't jump. You sit and make a virtue of what you have. And what you do is this: you make the kids think that anyone, anyone can jump, but it takes a wise old buzzard to know how to sit there and rock.
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Julian Barnes |
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4f54e7b
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For here is the final tormenting, unanswerable question: what is "success" in mourning? Does it lie in remembering or in forgetting? A staying still or a moving on? Or some combination of both?"
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Julian Barnes |
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6d56ec6
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Je zit er nog middenin. Je zult er altijd middenin blijven zitten. Nee, niet letterlijk. Maar in je hart. Niets houdt ooit op, niet als het zo diep is gaan zitten. Je zult altijd met een open wond blijven rondlopen. Dat is na verloop van tijd nog de enige keus. Met een open wond rondlopen of dood. Denk je ook niet?
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Julian Barnes |
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28021fd
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And so, by the end, you have tried soft love and tough love, feelings and reason, truth and lies, promises and threats, hope and stoicism.
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Julian Barnes |
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11334d5
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Never forget, the most vulnerable spot is down the middle.
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Julian Barnes |
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88a5e9e
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Everything you wanted to say required a context. If you gave the full context, people thought you a rambling old fool. If you didn't give the context, people thought you a laconic old fool.
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Julian Barnes |
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c0848af
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The cure for sex is marriage; the cure for love is marriage; the cure for infidelity is divorce; the cure for unhappiness is work; the cure for extreme unhappiness is drink; the cure for death is a frail belief in the afterlife.
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Julian Barnes |
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49df3c8
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So, you see, we're a played-out generation. All the best ones went. We were left with the lesser ones. It's always like that in war. That's why it's up to your generation now.
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Julian Barnes |
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52d06f6
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First love fixes a life for ever: this much I have discovered over the years.
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Julian Barnes |