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50cd7fe
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I used to believe, when I was 'just' a reader, that writers, because they wrote books where truth was found, because they described the world, because they saw into the human heart, because they grasped both the particular and the general and were able to re-create both in free yet structured forms, because they understood, must therefore be more sensitive- also less vain, less selfish- than other people. Then I became a writer, and started..
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Julian Barnes |
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1f87fdc
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With a lover, a wife, when you find the worst - be it infidelity or lack of love, madness or the suicidal spark - you are almost relieved. Life is as I thought it was; shall we now celebrate this disappointment?
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Julian Barnes |
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072d1ad
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When I was going out with her, it always seemed that her actions were instinctive. But then I was resistant to the whole idea that women were or could be manipulative. This may tell you more about me than it does about her. And even if I were to decide, at this late stage, that she was and always had been calculating, I'm not sure it would help matters. By which I mean: help me.
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Julian Barnes |
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1fa5578
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Indeed, isn't the whole business of ascribing responsibility kind of a cop-out? We want to blame an individual so that everyone else is exculpated. Or we blame a historical process as a way of exonerating individuals. Or it's all anarchic chaos, with the same consequence. It seems to me that there is--was--a chain of individual responsibilities, all of which were necessary, but not so long a chain that everybody can simply blame everyone el..
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Julian Barnes |
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9a006ec
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What was the point of having a situation worthy of fiction if the protagonist didn't behave as he would have done in a book?
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reality
life
protagonist
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Julian Barnes |
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a5e195d
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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. It's a bit like the black box aer..
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Julian Barnes |
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c2a3a39
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Parece-me que pode ser esta uma das diferencas entre a juventude e a idade: quando somos jovens, inventamos futuros diferentes para nos; quando somos velhos, inventamos passados diferentes para os outros.
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Julian Barnes |
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32b0b7b
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In life, every ending is just the start of another story.
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story
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Julian Barnes |
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f5610a4
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Not merely hope, but any burdensome yearning: ambition, hatred, love (especially love) - how rarely do our emotions meet the object they seem to deserve? How hopelessly we signal; how dark the sky; how big the waves. We are all lost at see, washed between hope and despair, hailing something that may never come to rescue us. Catastrophe has become art; but this is no reducing process. It is freeing, enlarging, explaining. Catastrophe has bec..
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feelings
emotions
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Julian Barnes |
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d11c7d9
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Though sometimes, first love cauterises the heart, and all any searcher will find thereafter is scar tissue.
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metaphor
heartbreak
heart
first-love
the-only-story
julian-barnes
trauma
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Julian Barnes |
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222932f
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Life is like invading Russia. A blitz start, massed shakos, plumes dancing like a flustered henhouse; a period of svelte progress recorded in ebullient despatches as the enemy falls back; then the beginning of a long, morale-sapping trudge with rations getting shorter and the first snowflakes upon your face. The enemy burns Moscow and you yield to General January, whose fingernails are very icicles. Bitter retreat. Harrying Cossacks. Eventu..
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life
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Julian Barnes |
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a3d9b4e
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poets seem able to turn bad love - selfish, shitty love - into good love poetry. Prose writers lack this power of admirable, dishonest transformation. We can only turn bad love into prose about bad love. So we are envious (and slightly distrustful) when poets talk to us of love.
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Julian Barnes |
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4e1e5a8
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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 back-tracking, more false memories. Back then, you can remember your short life in its entirety. Later, the memory becomes a thing of shreds and patches. It's a bit like the black box ..
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Julian Barnes |
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15e4bed
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Quantas vezes contamos a historia da nossa vida? Quantas vezes adaptamos, embelezamos, fazemos cortes matreiros? E, quanto mais a vida avanca, menos sao os que a nossa volta desafiam o nosso relato, para nos lembrar que a nossa vida nao e a nossa vida, e so a historia que contamos sobre a nossa vida. Que contamos aos outros mas -- principalmente -- a nos proprios.
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Julian Barnes |
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1365e9b
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It is important to understand that in the modern world we prefer the replica to the original because it gives us the greater frisson. I leave that word in French because I think you understand it well that way.
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Julian Barnes |
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a9bdc3c
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Was this their exact exchange? Almost certainly not. Still, it is my best memory of their exchange.
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Julian Barnes |
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5378479
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I've never written a book, except my first, without at some point considering that I might die before it was completed. This is all part of the superstition, the folklore, the mania of the business, the fetishistic fuss.....Dying in the middle of a wo(rd), or three-fifths of the way through a nov(el). My friend the nov(el)ist Brian Moore used to fear this as well, though for an extra reason: "Because some bastard will come along and finish ..
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Julian Barnes |
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ff3ab8a
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Time...give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.
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time
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Julian Barnes |
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ac85351
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If you'll excuse a brief history lesson: most people didn't experience 'the sixties' until the seventies. Which meant, logically, that most people in the sixties were still experiencing the fifties--or, in my case, bits of both decades side by side. Which made things rather confusing.
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seventies
sixties
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Julian Barnes |
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fd9877c
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Life versus Death becomes, as Montaigne pointed out, Old Age versus Death.
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death
life
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Julian Barnes |
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233f952
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Taxi-drivers in Frankfurt are said to dislike the annual Book Fair because literary folk, instead of being shuttled to prostitutes like respectable members of other convening professions, prefer to stay in their hotels and fuck one another
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sex
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Julian Barnes |
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a323fae
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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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88fa0c9
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Things, once gone, can't be put back; he knew that now. A punch, once delivered, can't be withdrawn. Words, once spoken, can't be unsaid. We may go on as if nothing has been lost, nothing done, nothing said; we may claim to forget it all; but our innermost core doesn't forget, because we have been changed forever.
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Julian Barnes |
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97722ae
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They say time finds you out, don't they?
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Julian Barnes |
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8d89662
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I certainly believe we all suffer damage, one way or another.
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Julian Barnes |
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fd0282f
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and who's to say what would have been for the best? You only found out afterwards, when it was too late.
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Julian Barnes |
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350656b
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I would have to go back into my past and deal with Adrian. My philosopher friend, who gazed on life and decided that any responsible, thinking individual should have the right to reject this gift that had never been asked for - and whose noble gesture re-emphasised with each passing decade the compromise and littleness that most lives consist of. 'Most lives': my life.
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suicide
regret
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Julian Barnes |
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51120d2
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Am I to be a king, or just a pig?' Gustave writes in his . At nineteen, it always looks as simple as this. There is the life, and then there is the not-life; the life of ambition served, or the life of porcine failure. ... What did he learn instead? Instead he learned that life is not a choice between murdering your way to the throne or slopping back in a sty; that there are swinish kings and regal hogs; that the king may envy the pig; and..
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Julian Barnes |
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db15841
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First love fixes a life for ever: this much I have discovered over the years. It may not outrank subsequent loves, but they will always be affected by its existence.
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Julian Barnes |
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6ef977a
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If you turned your back on irony, it curdled into sarcasm. And what good was it then? Sarcasm was irony which had lost its soul.
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sarcasm
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Julian Barnes |
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1bf1e80
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You're still in it. You'll always be in it. No, not literally. But in your heart. Nothing ever ends, not if it's gone that deep. You'll always be walking wounded. That's the only choice, after a while. Walking wounded, or dead. Don't you agree?
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relationships
walking-wounded
the-only-story
irrevocable
julian-barnes
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Julian Barnes |
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20c4671
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Isn't the most reliable form of pleasure, Flaubert implies, the pleasure of anticipation? Who needs to burst into fulfilment's desolate attic?
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Julian Barnes |
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1588628
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Susan had pointed out that everyone has their love story. Even if it was a fiasco, even if it fizzled out, never got going, had all been in the mind to begin with: that didn't make it any the less real. And it was the only story.
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love-story
love
the-only-story
unrequited-love
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Julian Barnes |
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54397dd
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Does character develop over time? In novels, of course it does:otherwise there wouldn't be much of a story. But in life? I sometimes wonder. 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 the character peaks a little later ;between twenty and thirty, say. And after that we're just stuck with what we've got..
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psychological
philosophical
the-sense-of-an-ending
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Julian Barnes |
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e853a5d
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Every bird you downed bore pebbles in its gizzard from a land the maps ignored.
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Julian Barnes |
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dc739bc
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Is there anything more plausible than a second hand?
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time
watch
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Julian Barnes |
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3729c23
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When we killed - or exiled - God, we also killed ourselves. Did we notice that 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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26b59b9
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Our parents thought we might be corrupted by one another into becoming whatever it was they most feared: an incorrigible masturbator, a winsome homosexual, a recklessly impregnatory libertine. On our behalf they dreaded the closeness of adolescent friendship, the predatory behaviour of strangers on trains, the lure of the wrong kind of girl. How far their anxieties outran our experience.
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growing-up
parents
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Julian Barnes |
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6e45a0f
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He gave the impression that he believed in things. We did too--it was just that we wanted to believe in our own things, rather than what had been decided for us. Hence what we thought of as our cleansing scepticism.
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Julian Barnes |
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1b45b5d
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When we're onstage we're not literature, we're sitcom. You have to have catchphrases.
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Julian Barnes |
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a79b581
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There is the question of accumulation (...) 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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12b53e2
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Why should we expect age to mellow us? If it isn't life's business to reward merit, why should it be life's business to give us warm, comfortable feelings towards its end? What possible evolutionary purpose could nostalgia serve?
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Julian Barnes |
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85cb434
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How come I can't make her happy, how come she can't make me happy? Simple: the atomic reaction you expect isn't taking place, the beam with which you are bombarding the particles is on the wrong wavelength.
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Julian Barnes |
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d0efd30
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zmn dr Hkhm tthbytkhnndh `ml nmykhnd blkhh byshtr Hlt Hll drd.
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Julian Barnes |