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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| c282046 | Playing Cupid, I should have you know, isn't just a matter of flying around Arcadia and feeling your tiny winkle throb when the lovers finally kiss. It's to do with timetables and street maps, cinema times and menus, money and organisation. You have to be both jaunty cheerleader and lithe psychiatrist. You require the binary skill of being absent when present, and present when absent. | Julian Barnes | ||
| 2f770d8 | One way of legitimising coincidences, of course, is to call them ironies. That | Julian Barnes | ||
| 8b0667a | We live with such easy assumptions, don't we? For instance, that memory equals events plus time. But it's all much odder than this. Who was it said that memory is what we thought we'd forgotten? And it ought to be obvious to us that time doesn't act as a fixative, rather as a solvent. But it's not convenient--it's not useful--to believe this; it doesn't help us get on with our lives; so we ignore it. | Julian Barnes | ||
| 1584dbe | You got your cheese, I hope? You won't mind a word of advice? Eat it. Don't put it in a plastic bag in the fridge and save it for visitors; before you know where you are it'll have swollen to three times its size and smell like a chemical factory. You'll open the bag and be putting your face into a bad marriage. | Julian Barnes | ||
| 9876768 | what you end up remembering isn't always the same as what you have witnessed. | Julian Barnes | ||
| df31a8c | From time to time, I open a newspaper. Things seem to be proceeding at a dizzy rate. We are dancing not on the edge of a volcano, but on the wooden seat of a latrine, and it seems to me more than a touch rotten. Soon society will go plummeting down and drown in nineteen centuries of shit. There'll be quite a lot of shouting. | Julian Barnes | ||
| 1f6bdbc | He sometimes asked himself a question about life. Which are truer, the happy memories, or the unhappy ones? He decided, eventually, that the question was unanswerable. | julian-barnes life memories memory the-only-story truth unanswerable unhappy-memories | Julian Barnes | |
| 5844ee4 | My name is Stuart, and I remember everything. | Julian Barnes | ||
| dbc933f | The final tormenting, unanswerable question: what is 'success' in mourning? | grief mourning | Julian Barnes | |
| 4381fa9 | Afternoon sex was the best sex of all, Ann thought. Morning sex she'd had enough of in her time: usually it meant, 'Sorry about last night but here it is anyway'; and sometimes it meant, 'This'll make sure you don't forget me today'; but neither attitude charmed her. Evening sex was, well, your basic sex, wasn't it? It was the sex which could vary from enveloping happiness via sleepily given consent to an edgy, 'Look, this is what we came t.. | evening morning sex | Julian Barnes | |
| 020b1e9 | Marriage is the only adventure open to the cowardly. Gossip briefly wondered if gossip had invented the whole story, but gossip decided that the worst interpretation of events was usually the safest and, in the end, the truest. Like most of his life's writing, the play was concerned with love. and as in his life, so in his writing: love did not work. Love might or might not provoke kindness, gratify vanity and clear the skin, but it did not.. | Julian Barnes | ||
| 69e086e | And does history repeat itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce?No, that's too grand, too considered a process. History just burps, and we taste again that raw-onion sandwich it swallowed centuries ago. | Julian Barnes | ||
| 212a706 | The way, the truth and the life. You go on your way through life telling the truth. | Julian Barnes | ||
| c878b38 | And this is how I would remember it all, if I could. But I can't. | Julian Barnes | ||
| bff06f9 | My philosopher friend, who gazed on life and decided that any responsible, thinking individual should have the right to reject this gift that had never been asked for--and whose noble gesture reemphasised with each passing decade the compromise and littleness that most lives consist of. 'Most lives': my life. | Julian Barnes | ||
| 94f6a63 | I think it was the Earthrise that really kind of got everybody in the solar plexus ... We were looking back at our planet, the place where we evolved. Our Earth was quite colorful, pretty and delicate compared to the very rough, rugged, beat-up, even boring lunar surface. I think it struck everybody that here we'd come 240,000 miles to see the Moon and it was the Earth that was really worth looking at. At | Julian Barnes | ||
| 2c2da4f | I was also, slowly, to learn that there were painters whom you grew out of (like the Pre-Raphaelites); painters you grew into (Chardin); painters towards whom you had a lifelong, sighing indifference (Greuze); painters you suddenly became aware of after years of unnoticing (Liotard, Hammershoi, Cassatt, Vallotton); painters assuredly great but to whom your response was always a bit negligent (Rubens); and painters who would, whatever age yo.. | Julian Barnes | ||
| 3b29181 | Flaubert believed that it was impossible to explain one art form in terms of another, and that great paintings required no words of explanation. Braque thought the ideal state would be reached when we said nothing at all in front of a painting. But we are very far from reaching that state. We remain incorrigibly verbal creatures who love to explain things, to form opinions, to argue. Put us in front of a picture and we chatter, each in our .. | Julian Barnes | ||
| 8098ef5 | But that was too simple: the idea of a man split into two by a dividing axe. Better: a man crushed into a hundred pieces of rubble, vainly trying to remember how they--he--had once fitted together. -- | Julian Barnes | ||
| 3174fe1 | Constantly he went back over the evidence of his memories. | Julian Barnes | ||
| bf97b1b | Louise Colet was a proto-feminist who committed the sin of wanting to make someone else happy. | Julian Barnes | ||
| 0ab0df6 | Do you know what Nabokov said about adultery in his lecture on Madame Bovary? He said it was 'a most conventional way to rise above the conventional'. | Julian Barnes | ||
| fc353a0 | Nobody stops to think about the world anymore. We live in a world where they make children pay to see the fish eat. Nowadays even fish are exploited, she thought. Exploited, and then poisoned. The ocean out there is filling up with poison. The fish will die too | Julian Barnes | ||
| f53ce36 | Medicine then must have been such an exciting, desperate, violent business; nowadays it is all pills and bureaucracy. | Julian Barnes | ||
| ba9cc26 | He was drowning in want, his control shattering like glass blown out of a window by a blast concussion. He could almost imagine he heard the shards raining to the ground beneath them. The broken pieces of his willpower. Of his life. | cassandra-clare deleted-scene emma-carstairs jemma julian-blackthorn lord-of-shadows | Cassandra Clare | |
| 39ccbbc | The verdict of the coroner's inquest had been that Adrian Finn (22) had killed himself 'while the balance of his mind was disturbed.' I remember how angry that conventional phrase made me: I would have sworn on oath that Adrian's was the one mind which would never lose its balance. But in the law's view, if you killed yourself you were by definition mad, at least at the time you were committing the act. The law, and society, and religion al.. | law philosophy society suicide suicide-note the-sense-of-an-ending | Julian Barnes | |
| 24b5657 | An artist must either give up art or develop. There are, of course, two ways of giving up: stopping altogether or taking the familiar Hollywood course - making tricks out of what was once done for love. | Pauline Kael | ||
| 8c9f498 | In life," she wrote, "fantastically gifted people, people who are driven, can be too much to handle; they can be a pain. In plays, in opera, they're divine, and on the screen, where they can be seen in their perfection, and where we're even safer from them, they're more divine." In the fall of 1968 she found the" | Brian Kellow | ||
| 2da6415 | One can only hope." He took a step toward her, so only a few scant inches separated them. A white cascade of glittering light lit the night above his head and made his eyes sparkle. "Do you mean there is no charity in your heart for a poor, misguided soul such as myself? "You've guided yourself astray," she informed him, backing up, "and my poor brother, as well." Her thoughts and her wits seemed to have scattered, and she fought to keep an.. | Suzanne Enoch | ||
| 49d3077 | Even the way he was the only man she'd ever met who both could and dared to hold up his side of a conversation with her. | Suzanne Enoch | ||
| 2ba1697 | I've found that it's easier to be pleasant when there's less need to be so. | Suzanne Enoch | ||
| a7f930d | Shaw grinned again, wishing mightily that he and she were alone by the fire. "I never claimed to be much of a gentleman. But whether you tote about a parasol or not, you are every inch a lady. Quite possibly the finest I've ever met." "Goodness. If you continue saying such things, I'll begin to think you're smitten with me." "I'd describe it more as being clubbed into submission," he murmured, aware both that her palm had come to rest just.. | Suzanne Enoch | ||
| d6d9b37 | Does that mean there'll be no engagement ball?" "There will be," he said, "once I convince Josefina to say yes." "She turned you down?" Zachary asked skeptically. "She kicked me, actually. My timing did leave something to be desired." "Josefina kicked you," Eleanor repeated. At his nod, she pursed her lips. "Perhaps I do like her after all." | Suzanne Enoch | ||
| 8b4db53 | That explained a great many things he'd observed about Lilith Benton. No wonder she came near to throwing a blue fit every time he approached. He threatened to collapse the carefully respectablility she'd worked nonstop for six years to build. On the oter hand, he couldn't forget the way she'd responded to his kiss,, or the way she'd shivered at his light caresses. She liked being touched. She liked his touch. Jack gave a slight smile. Perh.. | Suzanne Enoch | ||
| 2aa67d2 | Until the battle with the Revanche he hadn't thought he would ever tire of gazing at the horizon. Only since then had he noticed that the view was . . . empty. | Suzanne Enoch | ||
| c0f3ea4 | Yes, it is." Bennett blew out his breath. "You can't expect me to...sit in the morning room and chat | Suzanne Enoch | ||
| 6fd609f | You might at least acknowledge that I put my self in harm's way on your behalf, Evie' the deeper voice of Viscount Dare came from her other side. Georgina stiffened. ' No you didn't. Go away now.' 'No, I didn't,' he repeated amiably, and nodded. ' Goodbye.' 'Wait!' Evelyn caught his arm. ' What do you mean, on my behalf?' 'I...ah...' He glanced over her head at his wife. 'I don't mean anything. I have a mental disability. | humour tristan | Suzanne Enoch | |
| 2046eca | And even though he enjoyed being around her, he resisted her, because he was supremely aware that he wasn't the old Robert any longer; he was Bit, a piece of what he'd once been. | Suzanne Enoch | ||
| e3c8310 | Everton" (Francis) Alex turned his head to view a rainbow peacock mask bobbing toward him. "Good Lord, Francis, you are replendent," he said admiringly. The peacock stopped beside him. "Dash it, Everton, how'd you know it was me?" You're still wearing your faux ruby ring." | masquerade romance | Suzanne Enoch | |
| 634cbac | If you ask me to leave now, I will." Slowly his mouth curved into that heart-stopping smile. "And then you'll miss what comes next." She shut her eyes for a heartbeat, trying to regain some control over her thoughts and her spread, wanton body. "What comes next?" "You do." He lowered his head again." | Suzanne Enoch | ||
| 35a01e6 | Phillipa blew out her breath. Running a finger along the soft flower petals, she unfolded the note. For Phillipa, she read to herself, She snorted. | love note | Suzanne Enoch | |
| f506de1 | Kate Walker's attitude is characteristic of contemporary feminists' determination not to reject femininity but to empty the term of its negative connotations, to reclaim and refashion the category: "I have never worried that embroidery's association with femininity, sweetness, passivity and obedience may subvert my work's feminist intention. Femininity and sweetness are part of women's strength. Passivity and obedience, moreover, are the v.. | embroidery femininity feminism | Rozsika Parker | |
| a0f4e8a | However, the most striking evidence of Brahmanical hostility towards Buddhism comes in the form of silence: the way in which India's Buddhist history, extending over large parts of the country and lasting for many centuries, was excised from the historical record. | Charles Allen | ||
| f9325ea | who feared God, but not death ... who thought none below him but the base and unjust, none above him but the wise and virtuous'. | Charles Allen |