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0a34b25
|
But ignoring the bad things makes you end up believing that bad things never happen. You are always surprised by them. It surprises you that guns kill, that money corrupts, that snow falls in winter. Such naivety can be charming; alas, it can also be perilous.
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Julian Barnes |
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d45ca17
|
You realize that you want official interference into other people's lives but not into your own. You also realize that your truthfulness has become dangerously flexible.
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Julian Barnes |
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b0254be
|
mental states can be inferred from actions. That's in history--Henry VIII and all that. Whereas in the private life, I think the converse is true: that you can infer past actions from current mental states.
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Julian Barnes |
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5d2c7d0
|
The orthodoxy runs, that if a marriage is founded on less than perfect truth it will always come to light. I don't believe that. Marriage moves you further away from the examination of truth, not nearer to it.
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Julian Barnes |
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cc7a401
|
And who does not want their love authenticated?
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love
the-only-story
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Julian Barnes |
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9c3d01a
|
You see--I hope you never get there yourself--but some of us get to the point in life where we realise that nothing matters. Nothing fucking matters.
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nothing-matters
world-weary
the-only-story
julian-barnes
nihilism
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Julian Barnes |
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565b66b
|
But if nostalgia means the powerful recollection of strong emotions--and a regret that such feelings are no longer present in our lives--then I plead guilty . . . And if we're talking about strong feelings that will never come again, I suppose it's possible to be nostalgic about remembered pain as well as remembered pleasure. And that opens up the field, doesn't it?
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pain
the-sense-of-an-ending
julian-barnes
memory
pleasure
nostalgia
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Julian Barnes |
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30d65ec
|
Jedan drugi prijatelj je umro, iznenada, katastrofalno, pored pokretne trake za prtljag na nekom stranom aerodromu. Njegova zena je otisla po kolica, kada se vratila, gomila ljudi je bila okupljena oko necega. Mozda se otvorio i prosuo neki kofer. Ali ne, otvorio se i prosuo njen muz, i vec je bio mrtav. Godinu ili dve kasnije, kada je moja zena umrla, napisala mi je: ,,.
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Julian Barnes |
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369b352
|
If Tony hadn't been fearful, hadn't counted on the approval of others for his own self-approval . . . and so on, through a succession of hypotheticals leading to the final one: so, for instance, if Tony hadn't been Tony.
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in-another-life
what-if
the-sense-of-an-ending
julian-barnes
regret
sad
|
Julian Barnes |
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fbe13ab
|
Yes, of course we were pretentious--what else is youth for?
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Julian Barnes |
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b7dc5e9
|
Once bitten, twice shy; twice bitten, forever shy.
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once-bitten-twice-shy
wounded
the-only-story
julian-barnes
hurt
|
Julian Barnes |
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f6e6a18
|
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.
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identity
former-self
the-sense-of-an-ending
julian-barnes
the-past
self
|
Julian Barnes |
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a956a82
|
And so, for the first time, I began to feel a more general remorse--a feeling somewhere between self-pity and self-hatred--about my whole life.
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life
self-pity
the-sense-of-an-ending
remorse
regret
self-hatred
|
Julian Barnes |
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8d517f5
|
We're all just looking for a place of safety. And if you don't find one, then you have to learn how to pass the time.
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Julian Barnes |
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36e2ef6
|
Oi arnetes tou khronou lene: ta saranta den einai tipota, sta penenta eisai sto anthos tes elikias sou, ta exenta einai semera san ta palia saranta, kai paei legontas. Auto pou xero ego einai oti uparkhei o antikeimenikos khronos, uparkhei omos kai o upokeimenikos, autos pou ton phoras ste mesa meria tou karpou sou, ekei pou khtupaei o sphugmos. Ki autos o prosopikos khronos, pou einai o alethinos, metrietai ste skhese pou ekheis me te mnem..
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Julian Barnes |
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4615fac
|
What could be put up against the noise of time? Only that music which is inside ourselves--the music of our being--which is transformed by some into real music. Which, over the decades, if it is strong and true and pure enough to drown out the noise of time, is transformed into the whisper of history.
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Julian Barnes |
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3102cc1
|
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.' But I don't feel part
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Julian Barnes |
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08e8568
|
We didn't do anger in my family. We did ironic comment, snappy rejoinder, satirical elaboration; we did exact words forbidding a certain action, and more severe ones condemning what had already taken place. But for anything beyond this, we did the thing enjoined upon the English middle classes for generations. We internalised our rage, our anger, our contempt. We spoke words under our breath.
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Julian Barnes |
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a7ea4cf
|
There were two ways of looking at life;or two extremes of viewpoint, anyway, with a continuum between them. One proposed that every human action necessarily carried with it the obliteration of every other action which might have been performed instead; life therefore consisted of a succession of small and large choices, expressions of free will, so that the individual was like the captain of some paddle steamer chugging down the mighty Miss..
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Julian Barnes |
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a36e0ec
|
It's a condition of our mortality. We have codes of manners to allay and minimise it, jokes and routines, and so many forms of diversion and distraction. But there is panic and pandemonium waiting to break out inside all of us, of this I am convinced. I've seen it roar out among the dying, as a last protest against the human condition and its chronic sadness. But it is there in the most balanced and rational of us. You just need the right c..
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Julian Barnes |
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29d812d
|
One small revenge might be to die and show no signs of having died.
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Julian Barnes |
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a710b2e
|
Work would be something I jogged along with; love would be my life.
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Julian Barnes |
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596835a
|
You remembered your past in cheerful terms because this validated your existence. You didn't have to see your life as any kind of triumph - his own had hardly been that - but you did need to tell yourself that it had been interesting, enjoyable, purposeful.
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Julian Barnes |
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caa3df3
|
How could I possibly be a better person without her than with her? Later, I thought: but he is just echoing Nietzsche's line about what doesn't kill us making us stronger. And as it happens, I have long considered this epigram particularly specious. There are many things that fail to kill us but weaken us for ever. Look around at those emotionally damaged by mere ordinary life.
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Julian Barnes |
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fb0ebd2
|
This is true, and defines the lostness of the grief struck. You constantly report things, so that the loved one 'knows'. You may be aware that you are fooling yourself (though, if aware, are at the same time not fooling yourself), yet you continue. And everything you do, or might achieve thereafter, is thinner, weaker, matters less. There is no echo coming back; no texture, no resonance, no depth of field.
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Julian Barnes |
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c8e4f5c
|
pustular berk with the charisma of a plimsole
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Julian Barnes |
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663ada0
|
La principal caracteristica del remordimiento es que no tiene remedio: que ha pasado el tiempo de las disculpas o enmiendas
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Julian Barnes |
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7927b96
|
How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but - mainly - to ourselves. Dear
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Julian Barnes |
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31fecfb
|
If the statistics of happiness depend on personal reporting, how can we be sure that anyone is as happy as they claim to be? What if they aren't telling the truth? No, we have to assume that they are, or at least that the testing system allows for lying. So the real question lay beneath: assuming that those canvassed by anthropologists and sociologists are reliable witnesses, then surely 'being happy' is the same as 'reporting yourself happ..
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Julian Barnes |
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8cc972d
|
I didn't want to press Veronica. I thought I'd wait for her to get in touch this time. I checked my inbox rather too assiduously. Of course, I wasn't expecting a great effusion, but hoped, perhaps, for a polite message that it had been nice to see me properly after all these years. Well, perhaps it hadn't been. Perhaps she'd gone on a trip. Perhaps her server was down. Who said that thing about the eternal hopefulness of the human heart?
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Julian Barnes |
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7aed1c5
|
My reading might be pointless in terms of the history of literary criticism; but it's not pointless in terms of pleasure.
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reading
|
Julian Barnes |
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399afce
|
He never married, and he never learned to dance. He was so resistant to dancing that most of the principal male characters in his novels take sympathetic action and refuse to dance as well.
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Julian Barnes |
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d8d613a
|
The present looks back at some great figure of an earlier century and wonders, Was he on our side? Was he a goodie? What a lack of self-confidence this implies: the present wants both to patronise the past by adjudicating on its political acceptability, and also to be flattered by it, to be patted on the back and told to keep up the good work.
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present
self-confidence
|
Julian Barnes |
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f201e11
|
Belki de her turlu ortak motifi ortadan kaldiran keder daha da fazlasini ortadan kaldiriyor: ortak motiflerin var olduguna olan inanci.
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Julian Barnes |
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3f8ba74
|
It 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,
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Julian Barnes |
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461d037
|
Who can control how much they love? If you can control it, then it isn't love. I don't know what you call it instead, but it isn't love.
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Julian Barnes |
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d61a296
|
When it comes to the dead, it is hard to retain, or posthumously acquire, treasuredom. Being a Great Writer in itself has little to do with the matter. The important factors are: 1) An ambassadorial quality, an ability to present the nation to itself, and represent it abroad, in a way it wishes to be presented and represented. 2) An element of malleability and interpretability. The malleability allows the writer to be given a more appealing..
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Julian Barnes |
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3e89ac0
|
We all know objective truth is not obtainable, that when some event occurs we shall have a multiplicity of subjective truths which we assess and then fabulate into history, into some God-eyed version of what 'really' happened.
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Julian Barnes |
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ac6263f
|
For instance: that when we are young and sensitive, we are also at our most hurtful; whereas when the blood begins to slow, when we feel less sharply, when we are more armoured and have learnt how to bear hurt, we tread more carefully.
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Julian Barnes |
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0073b09
|
We were essentially taking the piss, except when we were serious. He was essentially serious, except when he was taking the piss. It took us a while to work this out.
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Julian Barnes |
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4d34dd5
|
Dingen die eenmaal weg zijn, kunnen niet teruggehaald worden, dat wist hij nu wel. Een klap, eenmaal uitgedeeld, kan niet worden ingetrokken. Woorden, eenmaal uitgesproken, kunnen niet onuitgesproken worden gemaakt. We mogen verdergaan alsof er niets verloren, niets gedaan, niets gezegd is, we mogen beweren het allemaal te vergeten, maar ons diepste wezen vergeet niet, omdat we voor altijd veranderd zijn.
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relationships
|
Julian Barnes |
|
25390a8
|
I can see there might be a positive side to this wilful averting of the eye: ignoring the bad things makes it easier for you to carry on. But ignoring the bad things makes you end up believing that bad things never happen. You are always surprised by them. It surprises you that guns kill, that money corrupts, that snow falls in winter. Such naivety can be charming; alas, it can also be perilous.
|
|
|
Julian Barnes |
|
d50f919
|
trykhy khh bykh gwshmn shkhl mygyrd byd shfftryn trykh bshd w bynHl, bysh z hr chyz jy trdyd drd.
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Julian Barnes |
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dae11a1
|
He was too clever. If you're that clever you can argue yourself into anything. You just leave common sense behind.
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Julian Barnes |