Quotes from Julian Barnes

Love means never having to say you're sorry (on the contrary, it frequently means doing just precisely that).

And so, perhaps, with grief. We imagine we have battled against it, been purposeful, overcome sorrow, scrubbed the rust from our soul, when all that has happened is that grief has moved elsewhere, shifted its interest. We did not make the clouds come in the first place, and have no power to disperse them. All that has happened is that from somewhere -- or nowhere -- an unexpected breeze has sprung up, and we are in movement again.

Because once you had been through certain things, their presence inside you never really disappeared.

but what you end up remembering isn't always the same as what you have witnessed.

Yes, of course we were pretentious—what else is youth for?

We knew from our reading of great literature that Love involved Suffering, and would happily have got in some practice at Suffering if there was an implicit, perhaps even logical, promise that Love might be on its way.

And that's a life, isn't it? Some achievements and some disappointments.

We all pursue what we think is best for us, even if it means our extinction. Sometimes, especially if it means that.

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.

At times it feels as if life itself is the greatest loser, the true bereaved party, because it is no longer subjected to that radiant curiosity of hers.

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.

Those little age differentials, so crucial and so gross when we are young, erode. We end up belonging to the same category, that of the non-young. I've never much minded this myself. [p. 66]

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?

It seemed...that intelligence wasn't as pure and unalterable a characteristic as people believed. Being intelligent was like being good: you could be virtuous in one person's company and yet wicked in another's. You could be intelligent with one person and stupid with another. It was partly to do with confidence...In a way she had been more confident when she had been eighteen and foolish. At twenty-three, with Michael, she felt less confident and therefore less intelligent.

Memory is identity. I have believed this since – oh, since I can remember. You are what you have done; what you have done is in your memory; what you remember defines who you are; when you forget your life you cease to be, even before your death.

Everything you wanted to say required a context. If you gave the full context, people thought you a rambling old fool. If you didn't give the context, people thought you a laconic old fool.

he couldn't believe how falling love with Martha made things simpler. No, that wasn't the right word, unless 'simpler' also included the sense of richer, denser, more complicated, with focus and echo. Half his brain pulsed with gawping incredulity at his luck; the other half was filled with a sense of long-sought, flaming reality. That was the word: falling in love with Martha made things real.

And in these times, people were always in danger of becoming less than fully themselves. If you terrorised them enough, they became something else, something diminished and reduced: mere techniques for survival. And so, it was not just an anxiety, but often a brute fear that he experienced: the fear that love's last days had come.

One feeling at least grows stronger in me with each year that passes—a longing to see the cranes. At this time of year I stand on a hill and watch the sky. Today they did not come. There were only wild geese. Geese would be beautiful if cranes did not exist.

I need to return briefly to a few incidents that have grown into anecdotes, to some approximate memories which time has deformed into certainty.

The mechanism of natural selection depends on the survival, not of the strongest, nor the most intelligent, but of the most adaptable.

Mystification is simple. Clarity is the hardest thing of all. You trust the mystifier more if you know his deliberately choosing not to be lucid. You would trust Picasso all the way because he could draw like Ingres.

It seemed to me that we ought occasionally to be reminded of instability beneath our feet.

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.