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8dd6e80
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how time first grounds us and then confounds us....give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.
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Julian Barnes |
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61ab3eb
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The rainbow in place of the unicorn? Why didn't God just restore the unicorn? We animals would have been happier with that, instead of a big hint in the sky about God's magnanimity every time it stopped raining.
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Julian Barnes |
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c42cc47
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Strange how, when you are young, you owe no duty to the future; but when you are old, you owe a duty to the past. To the one thing you can't change.
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Julian Barnes |
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df4e603
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I remember laughing with relief that the same old adolescent boredom goes on from generation to generation. ...the words took me back to my own years of stagnancy, and that terrible waiting for life to begin. [p. 68]
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Julian Barnes |
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6167108
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Tertullian said of Christian belief that it was true because it was impossible. Perhaps love is essential because it's unnecessary.
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religion
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Julian Barnes |
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43ed922
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In those years before mobile phones, email and Skype, travelers depended on the rudimentary communications system known as the postcard. Other methods--the long-distance phone call, the telegram--were marked "For Emergency Use Only." So my parents waved me off into the unknown, and their news bulletins about me would have been restricted to "Yes, he's arrived safely,"and "Last time we heard he was in Oregon," and "We expect him back in a fe..
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travel
postcards
technology
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Julian Barnes |
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28b5781
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Love was by its very nature disruptive, cataclysmic; and if it was not, then it was not love.
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Julian Barnes |
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fb72a6f
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But if being on the level didn't shield you from pain, maybe it was better to be up in the clouds.
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Julian Barnes |
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7eff416
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But cockteasing is also a metaphor: she is someone who will manipulate your inner self while holding hers back from you.
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Julian Barnes |
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426cbca
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But life never lets you go, does it? You can't put down life the way you put down a book.
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life
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Julian Barnes |
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8b7c853
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If these are indeed the spirits of Englishmen and Englishwomen who have passed over into the next world, surely they would know how to form a proper queue?
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Julian Barnes |
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7b8ad39
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Sarcasm was dangerous to its user, identifiable as the language of the wrecker and the saboteur. But irony - perhaps, sometimes, so he hoped - might enable you to preserve what you valued, even as the noise of time became loud enough to knock out window-panes.
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Julian Barnes |
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16c3414
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History: the lies of the victors, the self-delusions of the defeated.
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Julian Barnes |
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7d40df8
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The best form of government is one that is dying, because that means it's giving way to something else.
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politics
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Julian Barnes |
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4b9a26d
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What is the easiest, the most comfortable thing for a writer to do? To congratulate the society in which he lives: to admire its biceps, applaud its progress, tease it endearingly about its follies.
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literature
writing
writers
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Julian Barnes |
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680ee2b
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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 pl..
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Julian Barnes |
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40e4673
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The strong cannot help confronting; the less strong cannot help evading.
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Julian Barnes |
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19bc03b
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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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72409c3
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juries should ask not "Is he guilty?" but rather "Is he dangerous?"
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Julian Barnes |
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5573239
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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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6d95a1f
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Everything is connected, even the parts we don't like, especially the parts we don't like.
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Julian Barnes |
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8c1f968
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You realize how sympathy and antagonism can coexist. You are discovering how many seemingly incompatible emotions can thrive, side by side, in the same human heart.
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human
heart
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Julian Barnes |
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9e9c250
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Why should anything happen when everything has happened?
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Julian Barnes |
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4209a16
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Our lack of originality is something we usefully forget as we hunch over our--to us--ever-fascinating lives. My friend M., leaving his wife for a younger woman, used to complain, "People tell me it's a cliche. But it doesn't feel like a cliche to me." Yet it was, and is. As all our lives would prove, if we could see them from a greater distance--from the viewpoint, say, of that higher creature imagined by Einstein. "
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life
originality
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Julian Barnes |
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f97ad32
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I loved her; we were happy; I miss her. She didn't love me; we were unhappy; I miss her.
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Julian Barnes |
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68bc834
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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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9e18943
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There is a grotesquerie to grief as well. You lose the sense of your existence being rational, or justifiable. You feel absurd.
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grief
life
existential-crisis
purpose
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Julian Barnes |
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5428f2d
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Books are not life, however much we may wish they were
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Julian Barnes |
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c32bc0b
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History was repeating itself: the first time as farce, the second time as tragedy.
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Julian Barnes |
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cf52aec
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History is a raw onion sandwich, it just repeats, it burps. We've seen it again and again this year. Same old story, Same old oscillation between tyranny and rebellion, war and peace, prosperity and impoverishment
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Julian Barnes |
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d60984f
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Poets don't run out of material the way novelists do because they don't depend on material in the same way.
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Julian Barnes |
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8b2bb94
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It seemed to us philosophically self-evident that suicide was every free person's right: a logical act when faced with illness or senility; a heroic one when faced with torture or the avoidable deaths of others; a glamourous one in the fury of dissappointed love (see: Great Literature).
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Julian Barnes |
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b5d04b2
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How easy it was to be a Communist when you weren't living under Communism!
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Julian Barnes |
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cb7bcc5
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The past is a distant, receding coastline, and we are all in the same boat. Along the stern rail there is a line of telescopes; each brings the shore into focus at a given distance. If the boat is becalmed, one of the telescopes will be in continual use; it will seem to tell the whole, the unchanging truth. But this is an illusion; and as the boat sets off again, we return to our normal activity: scurrying from one telescope to another, see..
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past
truth
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Julian Barnes |
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ed0bd9e
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The main reason I felt foolish and humiliated was because of - what had I called it to myself, only a few days previously? - 'the eternal hopefulness of the human heart'. And before that, 'the attraction of overcoming someone's contempt'. I don't think I normally suffer from vanity, but I'd clearly been more afflicted than I realised.
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Julian Barnes |
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b3cc41a
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Todas as historias de amor sao potenciais historias de dor. Se nao no principio, depois. Se nao para um, para o outro. As vezes para ambos.
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Julian Barnes |
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4e775fd
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Though I remember, sharply, last things. The last book she read. The last play (and film, and concert, and opera, and art exhibition) that we went to together. The last wine she drank, the last clothes she bought. The last weekend away. The last bed we slept in that wasn't ours. The last this, the last that. The last piece of my writing that made her laugh. The last words she wrote herself; the last time she signed her name. The last piece ..
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Julian Barnes |
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a0bafdd
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Because at some point everyone wants to run away from their life. It's about the only thing human beings have in common
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Julian Barnes |
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d49094c
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The conventional accept and are frequently charmed by a certain unconventionality.
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Julian Barnes |
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94eeff2
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You must not be angry with me. You must think of me as an incomplete person.
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Julian Barnes |
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5107e68
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I feel sorry for novelists when they have to mention women's eyes: there's so little choice, and whatever colouring is decided upon inevitably carries banal implications. Her eyes are blue: innocence and honesty. Her eyes are black: passion and depth. Her eyes are green: wildness and jealousy. Her eyes are violet: the novel is by Raymond Chandler.
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writing
raymond-chandler
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Julian Barnes |
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7bbb3d5
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Our attitudes and opinions change, we develop new habits and eccentricities; but that's something different, more like decoration. Perhaps character resembles intelligence, except that character peaks a little later [...]. And after that, we're just stuck with what we've got. We're on our own. If so, that would explain a lot of lives, wouldn't it?
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Julian Barnes |
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7fb40ef
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We muddle along, we let life happen to us, we gradually build up a store of memories. There is the question of accumulation, but not in the sense that Adrian meant, just the simple adding up and adding on of life. And as the poet pointed out, there is a difference between addition and increase.
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Julian Barnes |
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a617f37
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It took a while, but I remember the moment - or rather, the suddenly arriving argument - which made it less likely that I would kill myself. I realised that, insofar as she was alive at all, she was alive in my memory. Of course, she remained powerfully in other people's minds as well; but I was her principal rememberer. If she was anywhere, she was within me, internalised. This was normal. And it was equally normal - and irrefutable - that..
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Julian Barnes |