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b7c0ad0
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His experience of life had left him with the belief that getting through the first sixteen years or so was fundamentally a question of damage limitation.
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Julian Barnes |
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c591e18
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Happiness depends necessarily on the unreality of one plane of your life: in one area ( emotional, financial, professional ), you should be living beyond your resources.
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Julian Barnes |
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ed3c04c
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If we had the choice, then there would be a question. But we don't, so there isn't. 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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f99d5f4
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el problema de vivir mas alla de tu mejor tiempo vital, mas alla del punto en que la vida ya no reporta alegria, sino tan solo desilusion y sucesos horribles.
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Julian Barnes |
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6962eb1
|
Everyone in the Village, every grown-up--or rather, every middle-aged person--seemed to do crosswords: my parents, their friends, Joan, Gordon Macleod. Everyone apart from Susan. They did either The Times or The Telegraph; though Joan had those books of hers to fall back on while waiting for the next newspaper. I regarded this traditional British activity with some snootiness. I was keen in those days to find hidden motives--preferably invo..
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Julian Barnes |
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e7a8938
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But if you think these are the only categories of sex that exist, you find you are mistaken. Because there is a category which you had not known to exist, something which isn't, as you might have guessed had you heard about it before, merely a subcategory of bad sex; and that is sad sex. Sad sex is the saddest sex of all.
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Julian Barnes |
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6841f61
|
Juntas a dos personas que nunca habian estado juntas. A veces es como aquel primer intento de acoplar un globo de hidrogeno a otro de aire caliente: ?prefieres estrellarte y arder o arder y estrellarte? Pero a veces funciona y se crea algo nuevo y el mundo cambia. Despues, tarde o temprano, en algun momento, por una razon u otra, una de las dos desaparece. Y lo que desaparece es mayor que la suma de lo que habia. Esto es quiza matematicamen..
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Julian Barnes |
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66b7874
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frangibility
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Julian Barnes |
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015d7c6
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There is only good vodka and very good vodka--there is no such thing as bad vodka.
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Julian Barnes |
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bb8452e
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Perhaps grief, which destroys all patterns, destroys even more,: the belief that any pattern exists
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Julian Barnes |
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27d3ac6
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Cast out the beam from your own eye before you seek to extract the mote from the eye of another.
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jeolous
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Julian Barnes |
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927621b
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From love's absolutism to love's absolution? No: I don't believe in the cosy narratives of life some find necessary, just as I choke on comforting words like redemption and closure. Death is the only closure I believe in; and the wound will stay open until that final shutting of the doors. As for redemption, it's far too neat, a movie-maker's bromide; and beyond that, it feels like something grand, which human beings are too imperfect to de..
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death
love
closure
platitudes
the-only-story
julian-barnes
realism
redemption
sad
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Julian Barnes |
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08b43fe
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wqty jwnym ayndhhy mtfwty bry khwdmn myafrynym, w wqty pyr myshwym, gdhshthhy mtfwty bry dygrn.
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Julian Barnes |
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57734b4
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deliquescent.
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Julian Barnes |
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7a78d5d
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fossicking
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Julian Barnes |
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418a878
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Apropo, cum preferati, autodistrugerea prin lipsa cunoasterii sau prin acumularea cunoasterii de sine?
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Julian Barnes |
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0bc579f
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A common response in surveys of religious attitudes is to say something like, 'I don't go to church, but I have my own personal idea of God.' This kind of statement makes me in turn react like a philosopher. Soppy, I cry. You have your own personal idea of God, but does God have His own personal idea of you? Because that's what matters. Whether He's an old man with a white beard sitting in the sky, or a life force, or a disinterested prime ..
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religion
god
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Julian Barnes |
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4459e04
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Tek sto dodemo na svet", rekao je Flober, ,,a vec s nas pocnu da otpadaju komadici."
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Julian Barnes |
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428286b
|
It may seem bad, Geoffrey, but you'll come out of it. I'm not taking your grief lightly; it's just that I've seen enough of life to know that you'll come out of it.' The words you've said yourself while scribbling a prescription (No, Mrs Blank, you could take them all and they wouldn't kill you). And you do come out of it, that's true. After a year, after five. But you don't come out of it like a train coming out of a tunnel, bursting throu..
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Julian Barnes |
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dcbf464
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Which are truer, the happy memories, or the unhappy ones? He decided, eventually, that the question was unanswerable.
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Julian Barnes |
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060d5fe
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That's to say, understanding Adrian's reasons, respecting them, and admiring him. 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. Did I think Adrian's action an implied criticism o..
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Julian Barnes |
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f9bf874
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animsanan hazlar kadar, animsanan acilar konusunda da nostaljik olmak mumkun
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Julian Barnes |
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4ab660a
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When we killed - or exiled - God we also killed ourselves. Did we notice sufficiently at the time? No God, no afterlife, no us. We were right to kill Him, of course, this long-standing imaginary friend of ours. And we weren't going to get an afterlife anyway. But we sawed off the branch we were sitting on. And the view from there, from that height - even if it was only the illusion of a view - wasn't so bad.
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Julian Barnes |
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2917c46
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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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d791f21
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Still, I'm not curious enough to find out. At this stage I prefer not to know.
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the-sense-of-an-ending
julian-barnes
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Julian Barnes |
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9101a56
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He had discovered love; but he had also begun to discover that love, far from making him 'what he was', far from spreading deep content all over him like carnation oil, would make him self-conscious and indecisive. He loved Tanya most clearly when he was away from her. When they were together, there were expectations on both sides which he was either unable to identify or couldn't respond to.
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Julian Barnes |
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04c3c1d
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Early on, she had told him, tenderly, that she had been attracted to him because he was pure and open. But if this didn't make her love him as much as he loved her, then he wished it were otherwise. Not that he felt pure and open. They sounded like words designed to keep him in a box
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Julian Barnes |
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89a7db8
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He felt life more clearly too--even, perhaps especially, when he came to decide that it wasn't worth the candle.
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suicide
feelings
life
suicidal
the-sense-of-an-ending
julian-barnes
sensitive
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Julian Barnes |
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a1572e4
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When you're young--when I was young--you want your emotions to be like the ones you read about in books. You want them to overturn your life, create and define a new reality.
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literature
youth
reality
life
passionate
the-sense-of-an-ending
julian-barnes
emotions
young
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Julian Barnes |
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9c107d3
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I thought--at some level of my being, I actually thought--that I could go back to the beginning and change things. That I could make the blood flow backwards. I had the vanity to imagine--even if I didn't put it more strongly than this--that I could make Veronica like me again, and that it was important to do so.
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irrevocable
the-sense-of-an-ending
julian-barnes
the-past
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Julian Barnes |
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c6886c5
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No, I was an odder old fool, grafting pathetic hopes of affection onto the least likely recipient in the world.
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the-sense-of-an-ending
julian-barnes
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Julian Barnes |
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c62df99
|
That next week was one of the loneliest of my life. There seemed nothing left to look forward to.
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the-sense-of-an-ending
julian-barnes
lonely
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Julian Barnes |
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8926cac
|
Still, as I tend to repeat, I have some instinct for survival, for self-preservation. And believing you have such an instinct is almost as good as actually having it, because it means you act in the same way.
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self-preservation
the-sense-of-an-ending
julian-barnes
belief
survival
survival-instinct
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Julian Barnes |
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96c859b
|
The answers hardly seemed of consequence. Not much did. I thought of the things that had happened to me over the years, and of how little I had made happen.
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life
looking-back
meaningless
passive
the-sense-of-an-ending
regret
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Julian Barnes |
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9aa7eb7
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I replayed the words that would forever haunt me. As would Adrian's unfinished sentence: 'So, for instance, if Tony . . .' I knew I couldn't change, or mend, anything now.
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irrevocable
unfinished
unfixable
the-sense-of-an-ending
julian-barnes
sad
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Julian Barnes |
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27bdd9a
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This last isn't something I actually saw, but what you end up remembering isn't always the same as what you have witnessed.
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the-sense-of-an-ending
memory
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Julian Barnes |
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1a1ce50
|
Back in 'my day'--though I didn't claim ownership of it at the time, still less do I now . . .
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the-sense-of-an-ending
julian-barnes
the-past
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Julian Barnes |
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335fb2c
|
But I was wrong about most things, then as now.
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wrong
the-sense-of-an-ending
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Julian Barnes |
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43021fd
|
May you be ordinary, as the poet once wished the newborn baby.
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Julian Barnes |
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103d7ad
|
You might even ask me to apply my 'theory' to myself and explain what damage I had suffered a long way back and what its consequences might be: for instance, how it might affect my reliability and truthfulness. I'm not sure I could answer this, to be honest.
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truth
reliability
unreliable-narrator
the-sense-of-an-ending
julian-barnes
meta
truthfulness
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Julian Barnes |
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ec3d703
|
L'arte appartiene a tutti e a nessuno. L'arte appartiene a tutti i tempi e a nessun tempo in particolare. L'arte appartiene a chi la produce e a chi l'assapora. L'arte non appartiene piu al Popolo e al Partito di quanto una volta non appartenesse all'aristocrazia e ai mecenati. L'arte e il mormorio della storia, udibile al di la del rumore del tempo. L'arte non esiste per se: esiste per il pubblico.
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storia
tempo
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Julian Barnes |
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46bb488
|
He became nervous, things blurred in his mind, and he would sometimes make a decision simply in order to have the matter settled rather than because he knew what he wanted.
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Julian Barnes |
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7b330fe
|
If you don't know what's true, or what's meant to be true, then the value of what isn't true, or isn't meant to be true, becomes diminished.
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Julian Barnes |
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0a75888
|
Style is a function of theme. Style is not imposed on subject-matter, but arises from it. Style is truth to thought.
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Julian Barnes |