Quotes from Julian Barnes

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.

We could not be further from ballooning's established tropes: freedom, spiritual exaltation, human progress. Redon's eternally open eye is deeply unsettling. The eye in the sky; God's security camera. And that lumpish human head invites us to conclude that the colonisation of space doesn't purify the colonisers; all that has happened is that we have brought our sinfulness to a new location.

Perhaps I just feel safer with the history that's been more or less agreed upon.

Time doesn't act as a fixative, rather as a solvent.

The relationship between professional and domestic cook has similarities to a sexual encounter. One party is normally more experienced than the other; and either party should have the right, at any moment, to say, No, I'm not going to do that.

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.

you have blown a large breach in the walls of my existence.

Sabía ya que sólo las viejas palabras servían: muerte, congoja, tristeza, pesar, sufrimiento. Nada moderadamente evasivo o medicinal. La aflicción es un estado humano, no médico, y aunque haya píldoras que nos ayuden a olvidarla - y todo lo demás -, no hay pastillas que la curen. Los afligidos no están deprimidos, sino solo debidamente, adecuada, matemáticamente tristes.

Manchmal glaube ich, es ist der Sinn des Lebens, uns mit seinem letzendlichen Verlust zu versöhnen, indem es uns zermürbt, uns beweist, auch wenn das eine Weile dauern kann, dass das Leben gar nicht so toll ist.

Grief, like death, is banal and unique. So, a banal comparison. When you change your make of car, you suddenly notice how many other cars of the same sort there are on the road. They register in a way they never did before. When you are widowed, you suddenly notice all the widows and widowers coming towards you. Before, they had been more or less invisible, and they continue to remain so to the other drivers, to the unwidowed.

as the witnesses to your life diminish, there is less corroboration, and therefore less certainty, as to what you are or have been. Even if you have assiduously kept records—in words, sound, pictures—you may find that you have attended to the wrong kind of record-keeping. What was the line Adrian used to quote? "History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.

the history that happens underneath our noses ought to be the clearest, and yet it's the most deliquescent. We live in time, it bounds us and defines us, and time is supposed to measure history, isn't it? But if we can't understand time, can't grasp its mysteries of pace and progress, what chance do we have with history—even our own small, personal, largely undocumented piece of it?

Nu cred c? mi-ar pl?cea un zeu dezaprobator. Oricum ai parte de destul? dezaprobare în via??. Mil?, iertare È™i-nÈ›elegere - de astea avem nevoie. ?i de ideea unui plan de ansamblu.

Try as I could—which wasn't very hard—I rarely ended up fantasising a markedly different life from the one that has been mine. I don't think this is complacency; it's more likely a lack of imagination, or ambition, or something.

Con quale frequenza raccontiamo la storia della nostra vita? Aggiustandola, migliorandola, applicandovi tagli strategici? E più avanti si va negli anni, Meno corriamo il rischio che qualcuno intorno a noi ci possa contestare quella versione dei fatti, ricordandoci che la nostra vita non è la nostra vita, ma solo la storia che ne abbiamo raccontato. Agli altri, ma soprattutto noi stessi. da Il senso di una fine

The answers hardly seemed of consequence. Not much did. I thought of the things that had happened to me over the years, and of how little I had made happen.

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.

But it's still the eyes we look at, isn't it? That's where we found the other person, and find them still.

The emphasis is on the lost, the abandoned, the discarded sinners, God's detritus.

Vivimos a ras de suelo, en lo llano, y sin embargo aspiramos a elevarnos [...] Algunos se elevan por medio del arte, otros con la religión; la mayoría, con el amor. Pero al elevarnos también podemos caer en picado [...] Cada historia de amor es en potencia una historia de aflicción. Si no al principio, más tarde. Si no para uno, para el otro. A veces para ambos

There had been addition—and subtraction—in my life, but how much multiplication?

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.

Jake, who is both fitter and more hedonistic than me, once told me what they say about martinis: One's perfect. Two's too many. And three's not enough.

All'improvviso mi sembra che una delle differenze tra la gioventù è la vecchiaia potrebbe essere questa: da giovani, ci inventiamo un futuro diverso per noi stessi; da vecchi, un passato diverso per gli altri. da Il senso di una fine