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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 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. | islands past | 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. | music musician | 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 | artifice naturalness | 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 | ||
| 088822e | I love you.' For a start, we'd better put these words on a high shelf; in a square box behind glass which we have to break with our elbow; in the bank. We shouldn't leave them lying around the house like a tube of vitamin C. If the words come too easily to hand, we'll use them without thought; we won't be able to resist. Oh, we say we won't, but we will. We'll get drunk, or lonely, or - likeliest of all - plain damn hopeful, and there are t.. | Julian Barnes | ||
| 3833e7f | Voleo bih da je zivot kao bankarstvo', rekao sam. 'Ne mislim doslovno. Ima tu vrlo komplikovanih stvari. Ali, na kraju sve shvatis ako se samo potrudis. Ili uvek postoji negde neko ko se razume, pa makar i naknadno, kad je vec kasno. Nevolja sa zivotom, kako se meni cini, jeste da moze vec za sve da bude kasno, a da ti ipak i dalje nista ne shvatas. | Julian Barnes | ||
| 12cfc1e | Back in 'my day' - though I didn't claim ownership of it at the time, this is what used to happen: you met a girl, you were attracted to her, you tried to ingratiate yourself, you would invite her to a couple of social events - for instance the pub - and then ask her out on her own, then again, and after a goodnight kiss of variable heat, you were somehow, officially, 'going out' with her. Only when you were semi-publicly committed did you .. | Julian Barnes | ||
| f5a5fd9 | Games are for childhood, and sometimes I think I lost my childhood young. | Julian Barnes | ||
| ff69680 | There is violence in this supposedly tender heart of mine. | violence | Julian Barnes | |
| 0b60f27 | Blame someone else, that's always your first instinct. And if you can't blame someone else, then start claiming the problem isn't a problem anyway. Rewrite the rules, shift the goalposts. | Julian Barnes | ||
| c19c87f | Love means never having to say you're sorry (on the contrary, it frequently means doing just precisely that). | Julian Barnes | ||
| 4f2f231 | In 1546 a band of weevils were tried for damaging church vineyards in St Julien. Such trials were rife in the sixteenth century, and the distinguished French lawyer Bartholomew Chassenee rose to fame as an advocate for animals. His work is commemorated in Julian Barnes's mischievous short story 'The Wars of Religion', in which excommunication is sought for a colony of woodworm which had gnawed away the supporting legs of the Bishop of Besan.. | imbecility weevils | Richard Mabey | |
| 0bafd04 | love might or might not promote kindness, gratify vanity, and clear the skin, but it did not lead to happiness; there was always an inequality of feeling or intention present. such was love's nature. of course, it 'worked' in the sense that it caused life's profoundest emotions, made him fresh as a spring's linden-blossom and broke him like a traitor on the wheel. | Julian Barnes | ||
| 81ad40d | The ability to see and examine himself; the ability to make moral decisions and act on them; the mental and physical courage of his suicide. "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 memorie.. | Julian Barnes | ||
| 3213a0a | To die from 'a draining away of one's strength caused by extreme old age' was in Montaigne's day a 'rare, singular and extraordinary death.' Nowadays we assume it as our right. | Julian Barnes | ||
| ac37ad9 | It had seemed to us philosophically self-evident that suicide was every free person's right: a logical act when faced with terminal illness or senility; a heroic one when faced with torture or the avoidable deaths of others; a glamorous one in the fury of disappointed love (see: Great Literature). | Julian Barnes | ||
| 11f8ab8 | It seemed to me that we ought occasionally to be reminded of instability beneath our feet. | Julian Barnes | ||
| ddc5baf | The thing I remember from the Letters Page in those antique days was the way the OBs signed off. There was Yours faithfully, Yours sincerely, and I have the honour to be, sir, your obedient servant. But the ones I always looked for - and which I took to be the true sign of an Old Bastard - simply ended like this: And then the newspaper drew even more attention to the sign-off by printing it: I used to muse about that. What did it me.. | Julian Barnes | ||
| ab93d93 | History just burps, and we taste again that raw-onion sandwich it swallowed centuries ago. | Julian Barnes | ||
| e1f4d67 | You are in love, at a point where pride and apprehension scuffle within you. Part of you wants time to slow down: for this, you say to yourself, is the best period of your whole life. I am in love, I want to savour it, study it, lie around in languor with it; may today last forever. This is your poetical side. However, there is also your prose side, which urges time not to slow down but hurry up. How do you know this is love, your prose sid.. | Julian Barnes | ||
| 0128f47 | Well, in one sense, I can't know what it is that I don't know. That's philosophically self-evident. | Julian Barnes |