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86922de
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You may say, But wasn't this the Sixties? Yes, but only for some people, only in certain parts of the country.
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the-sixties
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Julian Barnes |
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4affd5a
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The time-deniers say: forty's nothing, at fifty you're in your prime, sixty's the new forty, and so on. I know this much: that there is objective time, but also subjective time, the kind you wear on the inside of your wrist, next to where the pulse lies. And this personal time, which is the true time, is measured in your relationship to memory.
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Julian Barnes |
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06a3562
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The imagination doesn't crop annually like a reliable fruit tree. The writer has to gather whatever's there: sometimes too much, sometimes too little, sometimes nothing at all. And in the years of glut there is always a slatted wooden tray in some cool, dark attic, which the writer nervously visits from time to time; and yes, oh dear, while he's been hard at work downstairs, up in the attic there are puckering skins, warning spots, a sudden..
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writing
writers
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Julian Barnes |
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19f3f86
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But you find yourself repeating, "They grow up so quickly, don't they?" when all you really mean is: time goes faster for me nowadays."
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Julian Barnes |
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d874c7b
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He took his own life" is the phrase; but Adrian also took charge of his own life, he took command of it, he took it in his hands--and then out of them. How few of us--we that remain--can say that we have done the same? 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 ..
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Julian Barnes |
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515e2de
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You put money on a horse, it wins, and your winnings go on to the next horse in the next race, and so on. Your winnings accumulate. But do your losses? Not at the racetrack--there, you just lose your original stake. But in life? Perhaps here different rules apply. You bet on a relationship, it fails; you go on to the next relationship, it fails too: and maybe what you lose is not two simple minus sums but the multiple of what you staked. Th..
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Julian Barnes |
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455cde6
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Oliver used to have a theory he called Love, etc.: in other words the world divides into people for whom love is everything and the rest of life is a mere 'etc.,' and people who don't value love enough and find the most exciting part of life is the 'etc.
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love
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Julian Barnes |
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2e33922
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If I can't be sure of the actual events any more, I can at least be true to the impressions those facts left.
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Julian Barnes |
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bc27008
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The despairing are always being urged to abstain from selfishness, to think of others first. This seems unfair. Why load them with responsibility for the welfare of others, when their own already weighs them down?
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Julian Barnes |
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dfd0904
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This [...] isn`t something I actually saw, but what you end up remembering isn`t always the same as what you witnessed.
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Julian Barnes |
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908d542
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We can study files for decades, but every so often we are tempted to throw up our hands and declare that history is merely another literary genre: the past is autobiographical fiction pretending to be a parliamentary report.
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Julian Barnes |
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23f8845
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Who was it said that memory is what we thought we'd forgotten?
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Julian Barnes |
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6b2d9ae
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It was perfectly possible to be an artist, yet also to be robust and responsible.
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Julian Barnes |
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20216cf
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Music -- good music, great music -- had a hard, irreducible purity to it. It might be bitter and despairing and pessimistic, but it could never be cynical. If music is tragic, those with asses' ears accuse it of being cynical. But when a composer is bitter, or in despair, or pessimistic, that still means he believes in something.
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music
despairing
pessimistic
tragic
purity
cynical
cynicism
despair
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Julian Barnes |
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d1cce3d
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The engineers of human souls'. There were two main problems. The first was that many people did not want their souls to be egineered, thank you very much. They were content with their souls being left as they were when they had come into this world; and when you tried to lead them, they resisted. Come to this free open-air concert, comrade. Oh, we really think you should attend. Yes, of course, it is voluntary, but it might be a mistake if ..
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Julian Barnes |
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9bc4792
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Everyone has their love story. Everyone. It may have been a fiasco, it may have fizzled out, it may never even have got going, it may have been all in the mind, that doesn't make it any less real. Sometimes, it makes it more real. Sometimes, you see a couple, and they seem bored witless with one another, and you can't imagine them having anything in common, or why they're still living together. But it's not just habit or complacency or conv..
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love-story
true-love
relationships
love
meaningful
validation
the-only-story
julian-barnes
unrequited-love
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Julian Barnes |
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b1c1ec4
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Though 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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time
personality
history
philosophy
mellow
merit
memory
nostalgia
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Julian Barnes |
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eab234b
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For the point is this: not that myth refers us back to some original event which has been fancifully transcribed as it passed through collective memory; but that it refers us forward to something that will happen, that must happen. Myth will become reality, however sceptical we might be.
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myth
reality
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Julian Barnes |
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0250284
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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.
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Julian Barnes |
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8932a6b
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I wish life was like banking,' I said. 'I don't mean it's straightforward. Some of it's incredibly complicated. But you can understand it in the end, if you try hard enough. Or there's someone, somewhere, who understands it, even if only afterwards, after it's too late. The trouble with life, it seems to me, is that it can turn out to be too late and you still haven't understood it.
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life
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Julian Barnes |
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6904a70
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Those in favour rarely stayed in favour; it was just a question of when they fell.
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Julian Barnes |
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b47a79f
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After a long analysis of Robson's suicide, we concluded that it could only be considered philosophical in an arithmetical sense of the term: he, being about to cause an increase of one in the human population, had decided it was his ethical duty to keep the planet's numbers constant.
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unintentional-humour
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Julian Barnes |
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79e963c
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I remember, in no particular order: - a shiny inner wrist; - steam rising from a wet sink as a hot frying pan is laughingly tossed into it; - gouts of sperm circling a plughole, before being sluiced down the full length of a tall house; - a river rushing nonsensically upstream, its wave and wash lit by half a dozen chasing torchbeams; - another river, broad and grey, the direction of its flow disguised by a stiff wind exciting the surf..
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Julian Barnes |
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d4adf34
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forty's nothing, at fifty you're in your prime, sixty's the new forty, and so on.
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life
ageing
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Julian Barnes |
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6a77407
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in this country shadings of class resist time longer than differentials in age
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Julian Barnes |
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b9f7a66
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Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time's malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing--until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return.
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time
literature
history
life
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Julian Barnes |
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d3143e6
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So a)To what extent might human relationships be expressed in a mathematical or logical formula? And b) If so, what signs might be placed between the integers? Plus and minus, self- evidently; sometimes multiplication, and yes. division. But these signs are limited. Thus an entirely failed relationship might be expressed in terms of both loss/minus and division/ reduction, showing a total zero; whereas an entirely successful one can be repr..
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Julian Barnes |
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9c63b36
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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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04b63b9
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every relationship contains within it the ghosts, or the shadows, of all the other relationships it isn't. All the abandoned alternatives, the forgotten choices, the lives you could have led but didn't and haven't.
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Julian Barnes |
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8132c97
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The best fiction rarely provides answers; but it does formulate the questions exceptionally well.
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Julian Barnes |
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ed796bb
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Throw off your grief,' doubters imply, 'and we can all go back to pretending death doesn't exist, or at least is comfortably far away.
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mourning
grief
death
pretending
survival
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Julian Barnes |
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e535a57
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When she dies, you are not at first surprised. Part of love is preparing for death. You feel confirmed in your love when she dies. You got it right. This is part of it all. Afterward comes the madness. And then the loneliness: not the spectacular solitude you had anticipated, not the interesting martyrdom of widowhood, but just loneliness. You expect something almost geological-- vertigo in a shelving canyon -- but it's not like that; it's ..
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Julian Barnes |
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c7b59d2
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Is it splendid, or stupid, to take life seriously?
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Julian Barnes |
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ecfbbea
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Lovers are like Siamese twins, two bodies with a single soul; but if one dies before the other, the survivor has a corpse to lug around.
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Julian Barnes |
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d7adfa0
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There's something wrong with the young who can't be fascinated by a genius.
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Julian Barnes |
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40aa677
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Metti insieme due persone che insieme non sono mai state; a volte il mondo cambia e a volte no. Puo darsi che si schiantino e prendano fuoco, o che prendano fuoco e si schiantino. Ma a volte, invece, ne nasce qualcosa di nuovo, e allora il mondo cambia. Insieme, in quel primo momento esaltante, con quella sensazione esplosiva di ascesa, esse sono piu grandi dei loro se individuali. Insieme, vedono piu lontano, piu chiaro.
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Julian Barnes |
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662a4d8
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Don't get me wrong. I'm not recommending one form of love over another. I don't know if prudent or reckless love is the better, monied or penniless love the surer, heterosexual or homosexual love the sexier, married or unmarried love the stronger. I may be tempted towards didacticism, but this isn't an advice column. I can't tell you whether or not you're in love. If you need ask, then you probably aren't, that's my only advice... But I can..
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Julian Barnes |
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f3ba16a
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Adrian's fragment also refers to the question of responsibility: whether there's a chain of it, or whether we draw the concept more narrowly. I'm all for drawing it narrowly. Sorry, no, you can't blame your dead parents, or having brothers and sisters, or not having them, or your genes, or society, or whatever - not in normal circumstances. Start with the notion that yours is the sole responsibility unless there's powerful evidence to the c..
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Julian Barnes |
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964ae1a
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Mas o tempo... o tempo primeiro fixa-nos e depois confunde-nos. Pensavamos que estavamos a ser adultos quando estavamos so a ser prudentes. Imaginavamos que estavamos a ser responsaveis, mas estavamos so a ser cobardes. Aquilo a que chamavamos realismo acabava por ser uma maneira de evitar as coisas e nao de as enfrentar. Tempo... deem-nos tempo suficiente e as nossas decisoes mais fundamentadas parecerao instaveis e as nossas certezas, biz..
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tempo
nostalgia
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Julian Barnes |
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e8013ca
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Do the books that writers don't write matter? It's easy to forget them, to assume that the apocryphal bibliography must contain nothing but bad ideas, justly abandoned projects, embarrassing first thoughts. It needn't be so: first thoughts are often best, cheeringly rehabilitated by third thoughts after they've been loured at by seconds. Besides, an idea isn't always abandoned because it fails some quality control test. The imagination does..
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Julian Barnes |
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a82afaa
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you find yourself repeating, 'They grow up so quickly, don't they?' when all you really mean is: time goes faster for me nowadays.
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time
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Julian Barnes |
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cca106e
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my desire to ascribe responsibility might be more a reflection of my own cast of mind than a fair analysis of what happened, like the fact that we need to know the history of the historian in order to understand the version that is being put in front of us
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Julian Barnes |
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e82fa7e
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Some Englishman once said marriage is a long dull meak with pudding served first
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Julian Barnes |
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10822cb
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The law, and society, and religion all said it was impossible to be sane, healthy, and kill yourself. Perhaps those authorities feared that the suicide"s reasoning might impugn the nature and value of life as organised by the Page | 49 . state which paid the coroner? And then, since you had been declared temporarily mad, your reasons for killing yourself were also assumed to be mad. So I doubt anyone paid much attention to Adrian"s argument..
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suicide
life
society-individualism
law
society
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Julian Barnes |