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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 3d75a19 | Real literature was about psychological, emotional, and social truth as demonstrated by the actions and reflections of its protagonists; the novel was about character developed over time. | Julian Barnes | ||
| 892361e | When I felt myself escaping from the earth," he commented, "my reaction was not pleasure but happiness." It was "a moral feeling," he added. "I could hear myself living, so to speak." | Julian Barnes | ||
| e81362c | Real literature was about psychological, emotional and social truth as demonstrated by the actions and reflections of its protagonists; the novel was about character developed over time. | Julian Barnes | ||
| 2861ad6 | But I remember what Old Joe Hunt said when arguing with Adrian: that mental states can be inferred from actions. That's in history--Henry VIII and all that. Whereas in the private life, I think the converse is true: that you can infer past actions from current mental states. | Julian Barnes | ||
| 9c5fae0 | I can't do anything to you now, but time can. Time will tell. It always does. | Julian Barnes | ||
| 68fdcbf | Den mporeis na gineis kapoios allos khoris na papseis na eisai autos pou eisai. Kai auto kanenas den mporei na to antexei. | Julian Barnes | ||
| ede18c8 | Those in the middle got killed; governments and terrorists survived. At | Julian Barnes | ||
| 9b04c84 | I am a worm in comparison with His Excellency. I am a worm.' 'Yes, that's just it, you are a worm indeed. | Julian Barnes | ||
| cef3695 | They didn't want you to fake adherence to their banal taste and meaningless critical slogans - they wanted you actually to believe in them. | Julian Barnes | ||
| ff7d787 | Als je een goed boek leest, ontsnap je niet aan het leven, je stort je er juist dieper in. Er kan sprake zijn van een oppervlakkige ontsnapping - in verschillende landen, mores, spraakpatronen - maar wat je in wezen doet is je begrip versterken van de subtiliteiten, paradoxen, vreugde, pijn en waarheden van het leven. Leven en lezen zijn geen onderscheiden maar symbiotische waarden. | Julian Barnes | ||
| 526d1c8 | The few psychiatrists I respect always talk about people being mad. Use the short, simple, true words... "Mad" has the right sound to it. It's an ordinary word, a word which tells us how lunacy might come and call like a delivery van." | Julian Barnes | ||
| 2a5c584 | The other half wanted to say, I love you, come away with me, sit on my knee, I'll always remember you. You so full of your past, me so full of my future. | Julian Barnes | ||
| f2153bc | The pigs and sheep you see walking around today are zombies compared to their effervescent ancestors on the Ark. They've had the stuffing knocked out of them. And some of them, like the turkey, have to endure the further indignity of having the stuffing put back into them - before they are braised or boiled. | Julian Barnes | ||
| 63ebf13 | History is not just the lies of the victors; it is also the self-delusions of the defeated. | Julian Barnes | ||
| cc3dec2 | One weekend in the vacation, I was invited to meet her family. They lived in Kent, out on the Orpington line, in one of those suburbs which had stopped concreting over nature at the very last minute, and ever since smugly claimed rural status. | nature orpington suburbs | Julian Barnes | |
| 523b79d | Kathos metakinoumai kai akoumpao to kalami mou pano se mia gampa pou o upnos ekhei khalarosei tous mus tes, ekeine aisthanetai ti kano kai khoris na xupnesei aplonei to aristero tes kheri, pairnei ta mallia apo tous omous tes kai ta sekonei sto kephali tes, gia na mporeso na kourniaso ston gumno laimo tes. Kathe phora pou antidra etsi, e akribeia autes tes enupnias philophroneses me kanei n' anarrigo apo agape. | Julian Barnes | ||
| 1ee1c88 | Et combien faut-il de ces petites garces pour faire 2,5kg a votre avis? Je vais vous le dire : il en faut 300, c'est-a-dire, une fois coupees, 600 morceaux baignant dans leur jus, des pepins a oter 600 fois a la pointe du couteau, avec l'inquietude d'en oublier. | Julian Barnes | ||
| 24a7034 | To be Russian was to be pessimistic; to be Soviet was to be optimistic. | Julian Barnes | ||
| 746d349 | When he's cheerful his tongue runs away with him, and he's depressed he can be unkind. So it's common sense not to let him into every are of your life. | depressed | Julian Barnes | |
| 01bfe7b | Film-makers and actors can only show a version of the act, but writers can express what people are thinking, feeling, as well as doing. | Julian Barnes | ||
| 379e419 | But ignoring the bad things makes you end up believing that bad things never happen. You are always surprised by them. It surprises you that guns kill, that money corrupts, that snow falls in winter. | Julian Barnes | ||
| e72b7c7 | On our behalf they dreaded the closeness of adolescent friendship, the predatory behaviour of strangers on trains, the lure of the wrong kind of girl. How far their anxieties outran our experience. | Julian Barnes | ||
| 4f94cca | The diary was evidence; it was--it might be--corroboration. It might disrupt the banal reiterations of memory. It might jump-start something--though I had no idea what. | Julian Barnes | ||
| a885659 | Hoe vaak vertellen we ons eigen levensverhaal? Hoe vaak stellen we bij, verfraaien we, laten we handig dingen weg? En hoe langer het leven doorgaat, hoe minder er om ons heen overblijven om onze versie te betwisten, ons eraan te herinneren dat ons leven niet ons leven is, maar alleen het verhaal dat wij erover verteld hebben. Verteld aan anderen, maar - voornamelijk - aan onzelf. | leven verhaal | Julian Barnes | |
| 58aaf5b | But then, no one told the whole truth about sex. And in that respect, nothing has changed. | Julian Barnes | ||
| b4fdac3 | One of the first things she asked me was why I wore my watch on the inside of my wrist. I couldn't justify it, so I turned the face round, and put time on the outside, as normal, grown-up people did. | Julian Barnes | ||
| a8641e1 | I didn't want the day to unravel. Though looking back, it was not the day, but the four of us, that were beginning to unravel. | Julian Barnes | ||
| 1b98865 | If asked in a court of law what happened and what was said, I could only attest to the words "heading," "stagnating" and "peaceable." I'd never thought of myself as peaceable--or its opposite--until then. I would also swear to the truth of the biscuit tin; it was burgundy red, with the Queen's smiling profile on it." | Julian Barnes | ||
| 75a02b2 | Gradually, he didn't doubt, the world would calm down into a gigantic welfare state devoted to sporting, cultural and sexual exchange, with the accepted international currency being items of hifi equipment. | Julian Barnes | ||
| dbadc05 | A facetious if logical question comes into George's mind, from where he cannot tell, unless as a reaction to all this unwonted intensity. If these are indeed the spirits of Englishmen and Englishwomen who have passed over into the next world, surely they would know how to form a proper queue? | Julian Barnes | ||
| b97932a | There is the question of accumulation, but not in the sense that Adrian meant, just the simple adding up and adding on of life. And as the poet pointed out, there is a difference between addition and increase. | Julian Barnes | ||
| a5c559a | someone who will manipulate your inner self while holding hers back from you. | Julian Barnes | ||
| 5369023 | I reread this letter several times. I could scarcely deny its authorship or its ugliness. All I could plead was that I had been its author then, but was not its author now. Indeed, I didn't recognise that part of myself from which the letter came. But perhaps this was simply further self-deception. | Julian Barnes | ||
| b73943f | Then I thought about Adrian. My old friend who had killed himself. And this had been the last communication he had ever received from me. A libel on his character and an attempt to destroy the first and last love affair of his life. And when I had written that time would tell, I had underestimated, or rather miscalculated: time was telling not against them, it was telling against me. | Julian Barnes | ||
| 2072399 | Yes it was, but as I said, it depended on where--and who--you were. If you'll excuse a brief history lesson: most people didn't experience "the sixties" until the seventies. Which meant, logically, that most people in the sixties were still experiencing the fifties--or, in my case, bits of both decades side by side. Which made things rather confusing." | Julian Barnes | ||
| 047c867 | Logic: yes, where is logic? Where is it, for instance, in the next moment of my story? | Julian Barnes | ||
| 8386481 | melodramatic, I agree, but I plead youth as a mitigating circumstance), | Julian Barnes | ||
| 22a5ba5 | few incidents that have grown into anecdotes, to some approximate memories which time has deformed into certainty. If I can't be sure of the actual events any more, I can at least be true to the impressions those facts left. That's the best I can manage. | Julian Barnes | ||
| 2dc78a2 | This ought to have given him a whole storetank of existential rage, but somehow it didn't; | Julian Barnes | ||
| e9f6973 | Adrian, however, pushed us to believe in the application of thought to life, in the notion | Julian Barnes | ||
| 664dfd7 | most people didn't experience "the sixties" until the seventies. Which meant, logically, that most people in the sixties were still experiencing the fifties--or, in my case, bits of both decades side by side. Which made things rather confusing." -- | Julian Barnes | ||
| 143e888 | For some, Life is rich and creamy, made according to an old peasant recipe from nothing but natural products, while Art is a pallid commercial confection, consisting mainly of artificial colourings and flavourings. For others, Art is the truer thing, full, bustling and emotionally satisfying, while Life is worse than the poorest novel: devoid of narrative, peopled by bores and rogues, short on wit, long on unpleasant incidents, and leading .. | Julian Barnes | ||
| 78e0746 | Heroes become traitors, traitors become martyrs. | Julian Barnes | ||
| dfb7752 | Posterity will jump to conclusions: that is its nature. | Julian Barnes |