Quotes from Julian Barnes

So now, contended indifference before Middlesbrough against Slovan Bratislava coexisted with a craving for an art in which violent, overwhelming, hysterical and destructive emotion was the norm.

the littleness of life that art exaggerates"?

But I remember what Old Joe Hunt said when arguing with Adrian: that mental states can be inferred from actions. That's in history—Henry VIII and all that. Whereas in the private life, I think the converse is true: that you can infer past actions from current mental states.

You only followed where you were going if you wanted to get back to where you had started from, and she knew that was impossible.

few incidents that have grown into anecdotes, to some approximate memories which time has deformed into certainty. If I can't be sure of the actual events any more, I can at least be true to the impressions those facts left. That's the best I can manage.

But ignoring the bad things makes you end up believing that bad things never happen. You are always surprised by them. It surprises you that guns kill, that money corrupts, that snow falls in winter.

The orthodoxy runs, that if a marriage is founded on less than perfect truth it will always come to light. I don't believe that. Marriage moves you further away from the examination of truth, not nearer to it.

Ragana, pagalvojau. Jeigu pasaulyje yra moteris, kuri? gali ?simyl?ti ir vis tiek manyti, kad gyvenimo verta atsisakyti, tai toji moteris yra Veronika.

Truth to life, at the start, to be sure; yet once the process gets under way, truth to art is the greater allegiance

A woman's right to choose — yes, I believed in that, theoretically and actually. Though I also believed in a man's right to be consulted.

the liver of the bear is poisonous – the only part of any quadruped known to be so.

This ought to have given him a whole storetank of existential rage, but somehow it didn't;

What is History? Any thoughts, Webster?' 'History is the lies of the victors, I replied, a little too quickly. 'Yes, I was rather afraid you'd say that. Well, as long as you remember that it is also the self-delusions of the defeated.

both her secret life and her despair lay in the same inner chamber of her heart, inaccessible to me.

Strange how, when you are young, you owe no duty to the future; but when you are old, you owe a duty to the past. To the one thing you can't change.

And who does not want their love authenticated?

The one thing that is very good in life today is death.

Adrian, however, pushed us to believe in the application of thought to life, in the notion

Anyone who understood art knew that it never achieved what its maker dreamed for it. Art always fell short, and the artist, far from rescuing something from the disaster of life, was thereby condemned to be a double failure.

Sit yourself down, Joan instructed as we reached the the fag-fogged, gin-scented den that was nominally her sitting room.

He found himself reflecting on questions of honesty. Personal honesty, artistic honesty. How they were connected, if indeed they were. And how much of this virtue anyone had, and how long that store would last. He had told friends that if ever he repudiated Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, they were to conclude that he had run out of honesty

I lie in bed at home, trying to put feelings into words. On the one hand—and this is the part to do with the past—love feels like the vast and sudden easing of a lifelong frown. But simultaneously—this is the part to do with the present and the future—it feels as if the lungs of my soul have been inflated with pure oxygen.

those photographs taken from lunar orbit, in which our planet looks more or less like any other planet (except to an astronomer): silent, revolving, beautiful, dead, irrelevant.

When truth-speaking becomes impossible - because it led to immediate death - it had to be disguised. In Jewish folk music, despair is disguised as the dance. And so, truth's disguise was irony.