Quotes from barnes julian iii

I think a great book--leaving aside other qualities such as narrative power, characterization, style, and so on--is a book that describes the world in a way that has not been done before; and that is recognized by those who read it as telling new truths.

This is I have to admit, one murky compartment of the female psyche which has yet to benefit from the oven-scourer of Reason.

Happiness lies in the imagination, not the act. Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory.

When a line is good it ceases to belong to any school. A line of prose must be as immutable as a line of poetry.

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.

It never crosses my mind whether certain readers will like or dislike certain characters. They are who they are.

When you're 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.

The full-face portrait staring back at you hypnotises. Flaubert is usually looking away in his portraits and photographs. He's looking away so that you can't catch his eye; he's also looking away because what he can see over your shoulder is more interesting than your shoulder.

Any love is enveloping and potentially dangerous; after all, you are putting your heart into someone else's hands and with that an incredible power to cause pain of various kinds (and vice versa). That's a given. But there is an additional absolutism about first love, when you have nothing to compare it with. You don't know anything, yet you feel you know everything -- this can be calamitous.

History isn't the lies of the victors, as I once glibly assured Old Joe Hunt; I know that now. It's more the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious or defeated.