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b247444
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Nature is so exact, it hurts exactly as much as it is worth, so in a way one relishes the pain, I think. If it didn't matter, it wouldn't matter.
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Julian Barnes |
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2fb1d2f
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In my terms, I settled for the realities of life, and submitted to its necessities: if this, then that, and so the years passed. In Adrian's terms, I gave up on life, gave up on examining it, took it as it came. 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. All of it. I had lost the friends of my youth. I had lost the love of my wife. I had a..
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reality
compromise
self-pity
remorse
regret
memory
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Julian Barnes |
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b1049d1
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Is despair wrong? Isn't it the natural condition of life after a certain age? ... After a number of events, what is there left but repetition and diminishment? Who wants to go on living? The eccentric, the religious, the artistic (sometimes); those with a false sense of their own worth. Soft cheeses collapse; firm cheeses indurate. Both go mouldy.
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despair
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Julian Barnes |
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4d646f1
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He didn't really like travel, of course. He liked the idea of travel, and the memory of travel, but not travel itself.
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travel
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Julian Barnes |
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d4832fb
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Art belongs to everybody and nobody. Art belongs to all time and no time. Art belongs to those who create it and those who savour it. Art no more belongs to the People and the Party than it once belonged to the aristocracy and the patron. Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time. Art does not exist for art's sake: it exists for people's sake.
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Julian Barnes |
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f638e6b
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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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2d10e7f
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But I've been turning over in my mind the question of nostalgia, and whether I suffer from it. I certainly don't get soggy at the memory of some childhood knickknack; nor do I want to deceive myself sentimentally about something that wasn't even true at the time--love of the old school, and so on. 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 p..
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Julian Barnes |
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8c95c3e
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To own a certain book - and to choose it without help - is to define yourself.
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reading
collecting
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Julian Barnes |
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0085625
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Life ... is a bit like reading. ... 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. Similarly, why live your life? Because it's yours. But what if such an answer gradually becomes less and less convincing?
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living
readers
writers
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Julian Barnes |
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149dcb0
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Everything you invent is true: you can be sure of that. Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.
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poets
poetry
writing
reality
writers
creativity
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Julian Barnes |
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5f17bfb
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He had a better mind and a more rigorous temperament than me; he thought logically, and then acted on the conclusion of logical thought. 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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logical-thinking
logic
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Julian Barnes |
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14cbb4d
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Memory is identity....You are what you have done; what you have done is in your memory; what you remember defines who you are; when you forget your life you cease to be, even before your death.
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Julian Barnes |
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766c380
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This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn't turn out to be like Literature. Look at our parents--were they the stuff of Literature? At best, they might aspire to the condition of onlookers and bystanders, part of a social backdrop against which real, true, important things could happen. Like what? The things Literature was about: Love, sex, morality, friendship, happiness, suffering, betrayal, adultery, good and evil, heroes and villa..
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sex
literature
fiction
morality
god
life
love
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Julian Barnes |
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e4c5ed9
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Life seemed even more of a guessing game than usual.
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youth
interaction
conversation
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Julian Barnes |
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970d652
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We live on the flat, on the level, and yet - and so - we aspire. Groundlings, we can sometimes reach as far as the gods. Some soar with art, others with religion; most with love. But when we soar, we can also crash. There are few soft landings. We may find ourselves bouncing across the ground with leg-fracting force, dragged towards some foreign railway line. Every love story is a potential grief story. If not at first, then later. If not f..
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Julian Barnes |
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931f67a
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How do you turn catastrophe into art? Nowadays the process is automatic. A nuclear plant explodes? We'll have a play on the London stage within a year. A President is assissinated? You can have the book or the film or the filmed book or booked film. War? Send in the novelists. A series of gruesome murders? Listen for the tramp of the poets. We have to understand it, of course, this catastrophe; to understand it, we have to imagine it, so we..
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Julian Barnes |
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21dfa9d
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There is a German word, , which has no English equivalent; it means 'the longing for something'. It has Romantic and mystical connotations; C.S. Lewis defined it as the 'inconsolable longing' in the human heart for 'we know not what'. It seems rather German to be able to specify the unspecifiable. The longing for something - or, in our case, for someone.
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sehnsucht
longing
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Julian Barnes |
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9488820
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Loving humanity means as much, and as little, as loving raindrops, or loving the Milky Way. You say that you love humanity? Are you sure you aren't treating yourself to easy self-congratulation, seeking approval, making certain you're on the right side?
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mankind
humanity
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Julian Barnes |
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cd0e062
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Would you rather love the more, and suffer the more; or love the less, and suffer the less? That is, I think, finally, the only real question.
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suffering
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Julian Barnes |
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43557ab
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Pride makes us long for a solution to things - a solution, a purpose, a final cause; but the better telescopes become, the more stars appear.
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solution
purpose
pride
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Julian Barnes |
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e77abbb
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We live, we die, we are remembered, we are forgotten.
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Julian Barnes |
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7ac3e63
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Love is just a system for getting someone to call you Darling after sex.
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sex
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Julian Barnes |
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73c204b
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History isn't what happened, history is just what historians tell us.
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Julian Barnes |
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90e04f3
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Life and reading are not separate activities, When you read a great book, you don't escape from life, you plunge deeper into it.
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Julian Barnes |
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e103052
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Flaubert] didn't just hate the railway as such; he hated the way it flattered people with the illusion of progress. What was the point of scientific advance without moral advance? The railway would merely permit more people to move about, meet and be stupid together.
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progress
science
technology
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Julian Barnes |
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51b4a1a
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Love may not lead where we think or hope, but regardless of outcome it should be a call to seriousness and truth. If it is not that - if it is not moral in its effect - then love is no more than an exaggerated form of pleasure.
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meaning
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Julian Barnes |
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ebdd1f9
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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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56fe89e
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You put together two things that have not been put together before. And the world is changed. People may not notice at the time, but that doesn't matter. The world has been changed nonetheless.
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Julian Barnes |
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eee39c8
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You can put it another way, of course; you always can.
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Julian Barnes |
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f5752aa
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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 the 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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youth
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Julian Barnes |
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9c542f4
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Sarcasm is irony which has lost its soul
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Julian Barnes |
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75815b2
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Early in life, the world divides crudely into those who have had sex and those who haven't. Later, into those who have known love, and those who haven't. Later still - at least, if we are lucky (or, on the other hand, unlucky) - it divides into those who have endured grief, and those who haven't. These divisions are absolute; they are tropics we cross.
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Julian Barnes |
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f7209cc
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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 a 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 the..
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Julian Barnes |
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24c4dfd
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When you are in your twenties, even if you're confused and uncertain about your aims and purposes, you have a strong sense of what life itself is, and of what you in life are, and might become. Later.. later there is more uncertainty, more overlapping, more backtracking, more false memories. Back then, you can remember your short life in its entirety. Later, the memory becomes a thing of shreds and patches.
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Julian Barnes |
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0193e88
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It's easy, after all, not to be a writer. Most people aren't writers, and very little harm comes to them.
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Julian Barnes |
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80cbc79
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What happiness is there in just the memory of happiness?
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Julian Barnes |
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e78dd42
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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 person, and find them still.
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marriage
love
familiarity
contentment
long-term-relationships
habit
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Julian Barnes |
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a478aad
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The best life for a writer is the life which helps him write the best books he can.
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writing
writers
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Julian Barnes |
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e0940c1
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WHORES. Necessary in the nineteenth century for the contraction of syphilis, without which no one could claim genius.
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syphilis
whores
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Julian Barnes |
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33dfcc2
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You get towards the end of life--no, not life itself, but of something else: the end of any likelihood of change in that life. You are allowed a long moment of pause, time enough to ask the question: what else have I done wrong?
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life-lessons
life
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Julian Barnes |
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5283594
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Whisky, I find, helps clarity of thought. And reduces pain. It has the additional virtue of making you drunk or, if taken in sufficient quantity, very drunk.
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Julian Barnes |
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da86da7
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Novels tell us the most truth about life: what it is, how we live it, what it might be for, how we enjoy and value it, and how we lose it.
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Julian Barnes |
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c18d7f6
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May you be ordinary, as the poet once wished the new-born baby.
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Julian Barnes |
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29f4236
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Perhaps the world progresses not by maturing, but by being in a permanent state of adolescence, of thrilled discovery.
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Julian Barnes |