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Author: Julian Barnes
Quotes of Author: Julian Barnes
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  1. Julian Barnes _ Levels of Life

    This is true, and defines the lostness of the grief struck. You constantly report things, so that the loved one 'knows'. You may be aware that you are fooling yourself {though, if aware, are at the same time not fooling yourself}, yet you continue. 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.
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  2. Julian Barnes _ Levels of Life

    How could I possibly be a better person without her than with her? Later, I thought: but he is just echoing Nietzsche's line about what doesn't kill us making us stronger. And as it happens, I have long considered this epigram particularly specious. There are many things that fail to kill us but weaken us for ever. Look around at those emotionally damaged by mere ordinary life."
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  3. Julian Barnes _ A History of the World in 10½

    Women were brought up to believe that men were the answer. They weren't. They weren't even one of the questions.
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  4. Julian Barnes _ Flaubert's Parrot

    {on grief} And you do come out of it, that's true. After a year, after five. But you don't come out of it like a train coming out of a tunnel, bursting through the downs into sunshine and that swift, rattling descent to the Channel; you come out of it as a gull comes out of an oil-slick. You are tarred and feathered for life.
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  5. Julian Barnes _ The Sense of an Ending

    I remember a period in late adolescence when my mind would make itself drunk with images of adventurousness. This is how it will be when I grow up. I shall go there, do this, discover that, love her, and then her and her and her. I shall live as people in novels live and have lived. Which ones I was not sure, only that passion and danger, ecstasy and despair {but then more ecstasy} would be in attendance. However...who said that thing about "the littleness of life that art exaggerates"? There was a moment in my late twenties when I admitted that my adventurousness had long since petered out. I would never do those things adolescence had dreamt about. Instead, I mowed my lawn, I took holidays, I had my life.But time...how time first grounds us and then confounds us. We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but we were only being cowardly. What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things rather than facing them. Time...give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.
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  6. Julian Barnes _ The Sense of an Ending

    I know this much: that there is objective time, but also subjective time, the kind you wear on the inside of your wrist, next to where the pulse lies. And this personal time, which is the true time, is measured in your relationship to memory.
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  7. Julian Barnes _ The Sense of an Ending

    Does character develop over time? In novels, of course it does: otherwise there wouldn't be much of a story. But in life? I sometimes wonder. Our attitudes and opinions change, we develop new habits and eccentricities; but that's something different, more like decoration. Perhaps character resembles intelligence, except that character peaks a little later: between twenty and thirty, say. And after that, we're just stuck with what we've got. We're on our own. If so, that would explain a lot of lives, wouldn't it? And also-if this isn't too grand a word-our tragedy.
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  8. Julian Barnes _ The Sense of an Ending

    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.
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  9. Julian Barnes _ The Sense of an Ending

    When you're young - when I was young - you want your emotions to be like the ones you read about in books. You want them to overturn your life, create and define a new reality. Later, I think, you want them to do something milder, something more practical: you want them to support your life as it is and has become. You want them to tell you that things are OK. And is there anything wrong with that?
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  10. Julian Barnes _ The Sense of an Ending

    Yes, of course we were pretentious -- what else is youth for?
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  11. Julian Barnes _ Flaubert's Parrot

    The greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonorably, foolishly, viciously.
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  12. Julian Barnes _ The Sense of an Ending

    I certainly believe we all suffer damage, one way or another. How could we not,except in a world of perfect parents, siblings, neighbours, companions? And then there is the question on which so much depends, of how we react to the damage: whether we admit it or repress it,and how this affects our dealings with others.Some admit the damage, and try to mitigate it;some spend their lives trying to help others who are damaged; and there are those whose main concern is to avoid further damage to themselves, at whatever cost. And those are the ones who are ruthless, and the ones to be careful of.
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