Quotes from Julian Barnes

For Montaigne, the death of youth, which so often takes place unnoticed is the harder death; what we habitually refer to as 'death' is no more than the death of old age...The leap from the attenuated survival of senescence into nonexistence is much easier than the sly transition from heedless youth crabbed and regretful age.

why should we expect our collective memory – which we call history – to be any less fallible than our personal memory?

Well, in one sense, I can't know what it is that I don't know. That's philosophically self-evident.

Not that this let me off the hook. My younger self had come back to shock my older self with what that self had been, or was, or was sometimes capable of being. And only recently I'd been going on about how the witnesses to our lives decrease, and with them our essential corroboration. Now I had some all too unwelcome corroboration of what I was, or had been. If only this had been the document Veronica had set light to.

But he would never join their number, never be a member of the smiling retinue of former lovers. He considered that sort of behavior rather beastly, in fact immoral. He refused to be turned from a lover into a dear friend. He was uninterested in that transition.

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.

I blushed. You haven't seen a bald man in his sixties blush? Oh, it happens, just as it does to a hairy, spotty fifteen-year-old. And because it's rarer, it sends the blusher tumbling back to that time when life felt like nothing more than one long sequence of embarrassments.

But if nostalgia means the powerful recollection of strong emotions—and a regret that such feelings are no longer present in our lives—then I plead guilty.

Voleo bih da je život kao bankarstvo', rekao sam. 'Ne mislim doslovno. Ima tu vrlo komplikovanih stvari. Ali, na kraju sve shvatiš ako se samo potrudiš. Ili uvek postoji negde neko ko se razume, pa makar i naknadno, kad je ve? kasno. Nevolja sa životom, kako se meni ?ini, jeste da može ve? za sve da bude kasno, a da ti ipak i dalje ništa ne shvataš.

Every day is Sunday"—that wouldn't make a bad epitaph, would it?

Masters and parents used to remind us irritatingly that they too had once been young, and so could speak with authority. It's just a phase, they would insist. You'll grow out of it; life will teach you reality and realism. But back then we declined to acknowledge that they had ever been anything like us, and we knew that we grasped life--and truth, and morality, and art--far more clearly than our compromised elders.

It would be comforting if love were an energy source which continued to glow after our deaths.

But he was a connoisseur of the if-only, and so they did travel. They travelled in the past-conditional.

It seemed such a brief while ago that they were all laughing at Professor Nikolayev's definition of a musicologist. Imagine we are eating scrambled eggs, the Professor used to say. My cook, Pasha, has prepared them, and you and I are eating them. Along comes a man who has not prepared them and is not eating them, but he talks about them as if he knows everything about them - that is a musicologist.

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.

You might even ask me to apply my 'theory' to myself and explain what damage I had suffered a long way back and what its consequences might be: for instance, how it might affect my reliability and truthfulness. I'm not sure I could answer this, to be honest.

Had she told him that she loved him? Yes, of course, many times; but it was his imagination—the prompter's voice at his ear—which had added the words "for ever." He hadn't asked what she meant when she told him she loved him. What lover ever does? Those plush and gilded words rarely seem to need annotation at the time.

One way of legitimising coincidences, of course, is to call them ironies. That

Games are for childhood, and sometimes I think I lost my childhood young.

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.

For a woman, love has historically been a matter of possession followed by sacrifice: that's to say, of being possessed and then of being sacrificed.

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.

as for knowing your own mind, this seemed a bewildering process. How could you know your own mind without using your mind to discover your mind in the first place?

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.