|
05469a9
|
Theories were clean and convincing and comprehensible. Life was messy and full of nonsense.
|
|
|
Julian Barnes |
|
fe6f2b4
|
Cooking is the transformation of uncertainty (the recipe) into certainty (the dish) via fuss.
|
|
|
Julian Barnes |
|
7c45316
|
When you are in your twenties, if 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.
|
|
youth
twenties
|
Julian Barnes |
|
07d464a
|
How do we seize the past? Can we ever do so? When I was a medical student some pranksters at the end-of-the-term dance released into the hall a piglet which had been smeared with grease. It squirmed between legs, evaded capture, squealed a lot. People fell over trying to grasp it, and were made to look ridiculous in the process. The past often seems to behave like that piglet.
|
|
|
Julian Barnes |
|
7a59a37
|
And you can never prepare for this new reality in which you have been dunked.
|
|
|
Julian Barnes |
|
78acc9f
|
I swiftly realised how grief sorts out and realigns those around the griefstruck; how friends are tested; how some pass, some fail. Old friendships may deepen through shared sorrow; or suddenly appear lightweight.
|
|
|
Julian Barnes |
|
e8b53dc
|
everything was down to chance, that the world existed in a state of perpetual chaos, and only some primitive storytelling instinct, itself doubtless a hangover from religion, retrospectively imposed meaning on what might or might not have happened.
|
|
|
Julian Barnes |
|
ce44168
|
Who was it said that the longer we live, the less we understand?
|
|
|
Julian Barnes |
|
e806c93
|
Because once you had been through certain things, their presence inside you never really disappeared.
|
|
the-only-story
irrevocable
julian-barnes
ptsd
|
Julian Barnes |
|
250cad0
|
Old love is a row of beach huts in November.
|
|
|
Julian Barnes |
|
f098d0c
|
What was the point of scientific advance without moral advance? The railway would merely permit more people to move about, meet and be stupid together
|
|
progress
stupidity
science
|
Julian Barnes |
|
691278f
|
You only had to look at Noah and his wife, or at their three sons and their three wives, to realize what a genetically messy lot the human race would turn out to be.
|
|
|
Julian Barnes |
|
c50d9b2
|
People prefer to get what they want rather than what they deserve.
|
|
|
Julian Barnes |
|
a951ee0
|
Every love story is a potential grief story. If not at first, then later. If not for one, then for the other. Sometimes, for both. So why do we constantly aspire to love? because love is the meeting point of truth and magic.
|
|
|
Julian Barnes |
|
1e49237
|
After a number of events, what is there left but repetition and diminishment? Who wants to go on living? The eccentric, the religious, the artistic (sometimes); those with a false sense of their own worth. Soft cheeses collapse; firm cheeses indurate. Both go mouldy.
|
|
|
Julian Barnes |
|
5af2176
|
And since the griefstruck rarely know what they need or want, only what they don't, offence-giving and offence-taking are common.
|
|
|
Julian Barnes |
|
88cf71e
|
Insofar as I liked doing things by myself, it was partly for the pleasure of telling her about them afterwards.
|
|
|
Julian Barnes |
|
ad9f028
|
I still buy books faster than I can read them. But again, this feels completely normal: how weird it would be to have around you only as many books as you have time to read in the rest of your life.
|
|
|
Julian Barnes |
|
fe75603
|
Why slum it where people were burdened by yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that? By history? Here, on the Island, they had learnt how to deal with history, how to sling it carelessly on your back and stride out across the download with the breeze in your face.
|
|
past
islands
|
Julian Barnes |
|
ae0f34c
|
Umetnost pripada svakom i nikom. Umetnost pripada svakom vremenu i ne pripada nijednom. Umetnost pripada onima koji je stvaraju i onima koji je dozhivljavaju. Umetnost je shapat istorije, koji nadjachava shum vremena. Umetnost ne postoji radi umetnosti: ona postoji za dobro ljudi.
|
|
musician
music
|
Julian Barnes |
|
02b25a8
|
Like what? The things Literature was all about: love, sex, morality, friendship, happiness, suffering, betrayal, adultery, good and evil, heroes and villains, guilt and innocence, ambition, power, justice, revolution, war, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, the individual against society, success and failure, murder, suicide, death, God. And barn owls.
|
|
|
Julian Barnes |
|
dbce144
|
Such was humanity's self-love, Nadar concluded, that most were inevitably disappointed when they finally saw a true image of themselves.
|
|
|
Julian Barnes |
|
1928a82
|
I have always tried to live in an ivory tower, but a tide of shit is beating at its walls, threatening to undermine it.
|
|
|
Julian Barnes |
|
38ccb29
|
It had all begun, very precisely, he told his mind, on the morning of the 28th of January 1936, at Arkhangelsk railway station. No, his mind responded, nothing begins just like that, on a certain date at a certain place. It all began in many places, and at many times, some even before you were born, in foreign countries, and in the minds of others. --
|
|
|
Julian Barnes |
|
cb1240a
|
Is recycling to do with global warming? - Need you ask? - Well, I only ask because we've been recycling for twenty years or so, and no one was talking about global warming back then.
|
|
|
Julian Barnes |
|
5cda85d
|
Had he been naive, or overambitious? Both, probably. In life, you might be a bohemian and an adventurer, but you also sought a pattern, an arrangement to help you through, even if -- even as -- you kicked against it.
|
|
|
Julian Barnes |
|
913af40
|
Every day is Sunday"--that wouldn't make a bad epitaph, would it?"
|
|
|
Julian Barnes |
|
2cc44df
|
I blushed. You haven't seen a bald man in his sixties blush? Oh, it happens, just as it does to a hairy, spotty fifteen-year-old. And because it's rarer, it sends the blusher tumbling back to that time when life felt like nothing more than one long sequence of embarrassments.
|
|
memory
old-age
|
Julian Barnes |
|
7ee27e9
|
Masters and parents used to remind us irritatingly that they too had once been young, and so could speak with authority. It's just a phase, they would insist. You'll grow out of it; life will teach you reality and realism. But back then we declined to acknowledge that they had ever been anything like us, and we knew that we grasped life--and truth, and morality, and art--far more clearly than our compromised elders.
|
|
|
Julian Barnes |
|
d3aea80
|
It would be comforting if love were an energy source which continued to glow after our deaths.
|
|
|
Julian Barnes |
|
7f88cc6
|
It seemed such a brief while ago that they were all laughing at Professor Nikolayev's definition of a musicologist. Imagine we are eating scrambled eggs, the Professor used to say. My cook, Pasha, has prepared them, and you and I are eating them. Along comes a man who has not prepared them and is not eating them, but he talks about them as if he knows everything about them - is a musicologist.
|
|
|
Julian Barnes |
|
0bcf18a
|
Ia skazal, chto to, chto vy naidete sovsem neobiazatel'no budet tem, chego vy khoteli. Naprimer liubov'. Ona ne takaia, kak nam kazalos' vnachale. Vse soglasny? Luchshe, khuzhe, dol'she, koroche, bolee znachitel'na, menee znachitel'na, no ne takaia. I eshche, u kazhdogo po-svoemu. No eto to, chto uznaesh' lish' postepenno - chto dlia tebia liubov'. Skol'ko ee u tebia. Chto ty gotov radi nee otdat'. Kak ona zhivet. Kak ona umiraet. U Olivera..
|
|
|
Julian Barnes |
|
fb7a8dd
|
Had she told him that she loved him? Yes, of course, many times; but it was his imagination--the prompter's voice at his ear--which had added the words "for ever." He hadn't asked what she meant when she told him she loved him. What lover ever does? Those plush and gilded words rarely seem to need annotation at the time."
|
|
|
Julian Barnes |
|
a58248a
|
And this is where the Silent Ones cause further offense. They do not understand (how could they?) that they have a new function in your life. You need your friends not just as friends, but also as corroborators. The chief witness to what has been your life is now silenced, and retrospective doubt is inevitable.
|
|
|
Julian Barnes |
|
f08e28a
|
5.4 The question of accumulation. If life is a wager, what form does it take? At the racetrack, an accumulator is a bet which rolls on profits from the success of one of the horse to engross the stake on the next one. 5.5 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 ..
|
|
|
Julian Barnes |
|
208fc44
|
The law, and society, and religion all said it was impossible to be sane, healthy, and kill yourself.
|
|
|
Julian Barnes |
|
ec15fde
|
It may be all right, you may have talked about it and agreed it was all right, but that's not how sex works, is it? It's where the unsayable is king; it's where madness and surprise rule; it's where the cheques you write for ecstasy are drawn on the bank of despair.
|
|
|
Julian Barnes |
|
7df36f5
|
Young, middle-aged, elderly, old, dead: this was how life conjugated. (No, life was a noun, so this is how life declined. Yes, that was better in any case, life declined.
|
|
|
Julian Barnes |
|
6c64e73
|
I need to return briefly to a few incidents that have grown into anecdotes, to some approximate memories which time has deformed into certainty.
|
|
time
|
Julian Barnes |
|
47765cd
|
Or perhaps it's that same paradox again: the history that happens underneath our noses ought to be the clearest, and yet it's the most deliquescent. 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?
|
|
|
Julian Barnes |
|
f504c53
|
My own [story] is the simplest ... it hardly amounts to more than a convincing proof of my existence - and yet I find it the hardest to begin.
|
|
|
Julian Barnes |
|
7120963
|
Because just as all political and historical change sooner or later disappoints, so does adulthood. So does life. Sometimes I think the purpose of life is to reconcile us to its eventual loss by wearing us down, by proving, however long it takes, that life isn't all it's cracked up to be.
|
|
|
Julian Barnes |
|
7fad84c
|
Naturalness onstage is just as much an artifice as naturalism in the novel
|
|
naturalness
artifice
|
Julian Barnes |
|
014f19d
|
Love is anti-mechanical, anti-materialist: that's why bad love is still good love. It may make us unhappy, but it insists that the mechanical and the material needn't be in charge
|
|
|
Julian Barnes |