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eac1046
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Sleep democratizes fear. The terror of a lost shoe or a missed train are as great here as those of guerrilla attack or nuclear war.
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Julian Barnes |
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04cbeef
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wear flannel next to your skin, and never believe in eternal punishment.
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inspirational
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Julian Barnes |
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96bb0bb
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Music escapes from words: that is its purpose, and its majesty.
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Julian Barnes |
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bd08a45
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Tragedies in hindsight look like farces.
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tragedy
life
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Julian Barnes |
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b8375df
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That's one of the things about life. We're all just looking for a place of safety. And if you don't find one, then you have to learn how to pass the time
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Julian Barnes |
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b41c728
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The notion of redefining the deity into something that works for you is grotesque.
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Julian Barnes |
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d744849
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But art and religion will always shadow one another through the abstract nouns they both invoke: truth, seriousness, imagination, sympathy, morality, transcendence.
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religion
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Julian Barnes |
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ca8606e
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In love, everything is both true and false; it's the one subject on which it's impossible to say anything absurd.
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Julian Barnes |
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a023226
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I think there's a different authenticity to memory, and not an inferior one. Memory sorts and sifts according to the demands made on it by the rememberer.
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the-only-story
julian-barnes
memory
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Julian Barnes |
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10c6830
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At times, I suspect that the concept of maturity is maintained by a conspiracy of niceness.
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Julian Barnes |
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7bed1d6
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And mental states may be inferred from actions. The tyrant rarely sends a handwritten note requesting the elimination of an enemy.
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Julian Barnes |
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7108e3f
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but what you end up remembering isn't always the same as what you have witnessed.
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Julian Barnes |
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041769d
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We live in time--it holds us and moulds us--but I've never felt I understood it very well. And I'm not referring to theories about how it bends and doubles back, or may exist elsewhere in parallel versions. No, I mean ordinary, everyday time, which clocks and watches assure us passes regularly: tick-tock, click-clock. Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time's ..
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Julian Barnes |
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e8444ae
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And that's a life, isn't it? Some achievements and some disappointments.
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Julian Barnes |
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ec890af
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At times it feels as if life itself is the greatest loser, the true bereaved party, because it is no longer subjected to that radiant curiosity of hers.
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Julian Barnes |
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56b61f9
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Those little age differentials, so crucial and so gross when we are young, erode. We end up belonging to the same category, that of the non-young. I've never much minded this myself. [p. 66]
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Julian Barnes |
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2f5ee88
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I certainly believe we all suffer damage, one way or another. How could we not, except in a world of perfect parents, siblings, neighbours, companions?
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Julian Barnes |
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8112c1c
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In Jewish folk music, despair is disguised as the dance. And so, truth's disguise was irony.
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Julian Barnes |
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e8e2640
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What did I know of life, I who had lived so carefully? Who had neither won nor lost, but just let life happen to him? Who had the usual ambitions and settled all too quickly for them not being realised? Who avoided being hurt and called it a capacity for survival? Who paid his bills, stayed on good terms with everyone as far as possible, for whom ecstasy and despair soon became just words once read in novels?
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Julian Barnes |
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2a9120e
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The mechanism of natural selection depends on the survival, not of the strongest, nor the most intelligent, but of the most adaptable.
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Julian Barnes |
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171306e
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If novelists truly wanted to simulate the delta of lfe's possibilities, this is what they'd do. At the back of the book would be a set of sealed envelopes in various colours. Each would be clearly marked on the outside: Traditional Happy Ending; Traditional Unhappy Ending; Traditional Half-and-Half Ending; Deus ex Machina; Modernist Arbitrary Ending; End of the World Ending; Cliffhanger Ending; Dream Ending; Opaque Ending; Surrealist Ending..
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Julian Barnes |
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7aeb4c0
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An element of propaganda, of sales and marketing, always intervened between the inner and the outer person.
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Julian Barnes |
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d0f88e1
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I don't ever want to get old. Spare me that. Have you the power? No, even you don't have the power, alas.
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old
power
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Julian Barnes |
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df74235
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It is better to waste your old age than to do nothing at all with it.
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Julian Barnes |
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6b1b5de
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It seemed...that intelligence wasn't as pure and unalterable a characteristic as people believed. Being intelligent was like being good: you could be virtuous in one person's company and yet wicked in another's. You could be intelligent with one person and stupid with another. It was partly to do with confidence...In a way she had been more confident when she had been eighteen and foolish. At twenty-three, with Michael, she felt less confid..
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Julian Barnes |
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9bc9c26
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Mariac tells us about the books he's read, the painters he's liked, the plays he's seen. He finds himself by looking in the works of others. He defines his own faith by a passionate anger against Gide the Luciferian. Reading his 'memories' is like meeting a man on a train who says, 'Don't look at me; that's misleading. If you want to know what I'm like, wait until we're in a tunnel, and then study my reflection in the window.' You wait, and..
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existence
passion
life
condition
misleading
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Julian Barnes |
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c960664
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You can take Lucas to watch football when he's older,' she once told me. Ah, the rheumy-eyed grandpa on the terraces inducting the lad into the mysteries of soccer: how to loathe people wearing different coloured shirts, how to feign injury, how to blow your snot on to the pitch - See, son, you press hard on one nostril to close it, and explode the green stuff out of the other. How to be vain and overpaid and have your best years behind you..
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life-lessons
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Julian Barnes |
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7cfa11c
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he couldn't believe how falling love with Martha made things simpler. No, that wasn't the right word, unless 'simpler' also included the sense of richer, denser, more complicated, with focus and echo. Half his brain pulsed with gawping incredulity at his luck; the other half was filled with a sense of long-sought, flaming reality. That was the word: falling in love with Martha made things real.
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Julian Barnes |
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12bfc5f
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If I hadn't decided on cremation and a scattering, I could have used the phrase as an epitaph on a chunk of stone or marble: "Tony Webster--He Never Got It." But that would be too melodramatic, even self-pitying. How about "He's on His Own Now"? That would be better, truer. Or maybe I'll stick with: "Every Day Is Sunday."
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Julian Barnes |
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97667e8
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Martha was a clever girl, and therefore not a believer.
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Julian Barnes |
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006a253
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We listen to what people say, we read what they write--that's our evidence, that's our corroboration. But if the face contradicts the speaker's words, we interrogate the face. A shifty look in the eye, a rising blush, the uncontrollable twitch of a face muscle--and then we know. We recognise the hypocrisy or the false claim, and the truth stands evident before us.
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Julian Barnes |
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ab68a08
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Aeronautics did not lead to democracy, unless budget airlines count.
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Julian Barnes |
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a0259db
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Look, writers aren't , I want to cry, any more than husbands and wives are perfect. The only unfailing rule is, If they seem so, they can't be.
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Julian Barnes |
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79717c9
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He loved his mother: doesn't that warm your silly, sentimental, twentieth-century heart? He loved his father. He loved his sister. He loved his niece. He loved his friends. He admired certain individuals. But his affections were always specific; they were not given away to all comers. This seems enough to me. You want him to do more? You want him to 'love humanity', to goose the human race? But that means nothing. Loving humanity means as m..
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Julian Barnes |
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d3201a9
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And what percentage of people take up the option to die off?' She looked at me, her glance telling me to be calm. 'Oh, a hundred per cent, of course. Over many thousands of years, calculated by old time, of course. But yes, everyone takes the option, sooner or later.' 'So it's just like the first time round? You always die in the end?' 'Yes, except don't forget the quality of life here is much better. People die when they decide they've had..
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life
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Julian Barnes |
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9dcd0f7
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The trouble was, how could you know what question to ask? It seemed to her that you were in a position to ask a really correct question only if you already knew the answer, and what was the point of that?
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Julian Barnes |
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17aab00
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None of this, of course, was ever stated: the genteel social Darwinism of the English middle classes always remained implicit.
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Julian Barnes |
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ac43d29
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kai oi duo lene S'agapo gia na dioxoun ton phobo, gia na peisthoun apo ta logia gia ta erga, gia na bebaiothoun oti ekhei epelthei e polupothete katastase, gia na xegelasoun tous eautous tous me ten idea oti den ekhei parelthei akome. Prepei na phulagomaste apo tetoies khreseis. To S'agapo den prepei na bgainei ston kosmo, na ginetai nomisma, emporeusime metokhe, na mas apopherei kerde.
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Julian Barnes |
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654f76e
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Grief-work. It sounds such a clear and solid concept, with its confident two-part name. But it is fluid, slippery, metamorphic. Sometimes it is passive, a waiting for time and pain to disappear; sometimes active, a conscious attention to death and loss and the loved one; sometimes necessarily distractive (the bland football match, the overwhelming opera).
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Julian Barnes |
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22ab9fd
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And so, perhaps, with grief. We imagine we have battled against it, been purposeful, overcome sorrow, scrubbed the rust from our soul, when all that has happened is that grief has moved elsewhere, shifted its interest. We did not make the clouds come in the first place, and have no power to disperse them. All that has happened is that from somewhere -- or nowhere -- an unexpected breeze has sprung up, and we are in movement again.
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Julian Barnes |
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6d9bc5b
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We knew from our reading of great literature that Love involved Suffering, and would happily have got in some practice at Suffering if there was an implicit, perhaps even logical, promise that Love might be on its way.
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Julian Barnes |
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1864057
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How submerged does a reference have to be before it drowns?
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Julian Barnes |
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9fed70b
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Memory is identity. I have believed this since - oh, since I can remember. 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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f74abcc
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But there is panic and pandemonium waiting to break out inside all of us, of this I am convinced. I've seen it roar out among the dying, as a last protest against the human condition and its chronic sadness.
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Julian Barnes |