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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| eab234b | 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. | myth reality | Julian Barnes | |
| 3f880f7 | Es ist gut, eine Grossmutter zu haben, besonders eine, die Spukgeschichten erzahlen kann. | Astrid Lindgren | ||
| 0250284 | 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. | Julian Barnes | ||
| 8932a6b | 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. | life | Julian Barnes | |
| 6904a70 | Those in favour rarely stayed in favour; it was just a question of when they fell. | Julian Barnes | ||
| b47a79f | 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. | unintentional-humour | Julian Barnes | |
| 79e963c | 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.. | Julian Barnes | ||
| d4adf34 | forty's nothing, at fifty you're in your prime, sixty's the new forty, and so on. | ageing life | Julian Barnes | |
| 6a77407 | in this country shadings of class resist time longer than differentials in age | Julian Barnes | ||
| b9f7a66 | 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. | history life literature time | Julian Barnes | |
| d3143e6 | 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.. | Julian Barnes | ||
| 9c63b36 | 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. | Julian Barnes | ||
| 04b63b9 | 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. | Julian Barnes | ||
| 8132c97 | The best fiction rarely provides answers; but it does formulate the questions exceptionally well. | Julian Barnes | ||
| ed796bb | 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. | death grief mourning pretending survival | Julian Barnes | |
| e535a57 | 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 .. | Julian Barnes | ||
| c7b59d2 | Is it splendid, or stupid, to take life seriously? | Julian Barnes | ||
| ecfbbea | 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. | Julian Barnes | ||
| d7adfa0 | There's something wrong with the young who can't be fascinated by a genius. | Julian Barnes | ||
| 40aa677 | 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. | Julian Barnes | ||
| 662a4d8 | 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.. | Julian Barnes | ||
| f3ba16a | 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.. | Julian Barnes | ||
| 964ae1a | 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.. | nostalgia tempo | Julian Barnes | |
| e8013ca | 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.. | Julian Barnes | ||
| a82afaa | you find yourself repeating, 'They grow up so quickly, don't they?' when all you really mean is: time goes faster for me nowadays. | time | Julian Barnes | |
| cca106e | 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 | Julian Barnes | ||
| e82fa7e | Some Englishman once said marriage is a long dull meak with pudding served first | Julian Barnes | ||
| 10822cb | 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.. | law life society society-individualism suicide | Julian Barnes | |
| eac1046 | 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. | Julian Barnes | ||
| 04cbeef | wear flannel next to your skin, and never believe in eternal punishment. | inspirational | Julian Barnes | |
| 96bb0bb | Music escapes from words: that is its purpose, and its majesty. | Julian Barnes | ||
| bd08a45 | Tragedies in hindsight look like farces. | life tragedy | Julian Barnes | |
| b8375df | 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 | Julian Barnes | ||
| b41c728 | The notion of redefining the deity into something that works for you is grotesque. | Julian Barnes | ||
| d744849 | But art and religion will always shadow one another through the abstract nouns they both invoke: truth, seriousness, imagination, sympathy, morality, transcendence. | religion | Julian Barnes | |
| ca8606e | In love, everything is both true and false; it's the one subject on which it's impossible to say anything absurd. | Julian Barnes | ||
| a023226 | 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. | julian-barnes memory the-only-story | Julian Barnes | |
| 10c6830 | At times, I suspect that the concept of maturity is maintained by a conspiracy of niceness. | Julian Barnes | ||
| 7040b5a | The problem with a popular art form is that those who want something more are in a hopeless minority compared with the millions who are always seeing it for the first time, or for the reassurance and gratification of seeing the conventions fulfilled again. | conventionality quality repetitiveness standards | Pauline Kael | |
| 417772f | I'm glad you decided to come." "It doesn't mean anything." He grinned. "Everything means something." | Suzanne Enoch | ||
| b3dfa1e | There's quite a difference between skirting the rules and putting musket balls through them. | Suzanne Enoch | ||
| c58c0c2 | I could live without you, but I wouldn't want to | romance | Suzanne Enoch | |
| 9555632 | He lowered his head toward her, so she could feel his breath warm against her skin, their mouths only inches apart. "You're panting for it, aren't you, Princess?" he murmured." | Suzanne Enoch | ||
| e71c467 | You cannot hide from your heart, Kate. It always finds you. And, sadly, I cannot hide from mine. | Rysa Walker |