Quotes from Julian Barnes

Flaubert le salían las palabras con facilidad; pero también supo ver la insuficiencia subyacente de la Palabra. Recuérdese su triste definición en Madame Bovary: «La palabra humana es como una caldera rota en la que tocamos melodías para que bailen los osos, cuando quisiéramos conmover a las estrellas.»

But time Ã¢â'¬Â¦ how time first grounds us and then confounds us.

When you're young—when I was 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. And is there anything wrong with that?

In my opinion, every love, happy or unhappy, is a real disaster once you give yourself over to it entirely.

Tai ir yra gyvenimas, ar ne? Šiek tiek pasiekim? ir šiek tiek nusivylim?.

That was another nice thing about my parents. There was none of that holding on to knowledge and power that some parents go in for. We were all adults together, on a plateau of equality.

But that was the nature of relationships: there always seemed to be an imbalance of one sort or another.

Privately, the three of us examined his case and came up with a theory: that the key to a happy family life was for there not to be a family—or at least, not one living together. Having made this analysis, we envied Adrian the more.

The conservative, the slow-witted and the envious existed in every profession.

Time … give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.

Be to, tas skausmas truko neilgai. Kaip min?jau, turiu stipr? savisaugos instinkt?. Man pavyko išstumti Veronik? iš širdies ir iš gyvenimo

There is only good vodka and very good vodka—there is no such thing as bad vodka.

She has only a ghostplay on some frayed screen of memory, which she takes to be the present.

All that bothered him was the barking of dogs; that insistent, hysterical sound cut right across the music he heard in his head. That was why he preferred cats to dogs. Cats were always happy to let him compose.

El amor es elástico. No te limita.

Perhaps grief, which destroys all patterns, destroys even more,: the belief that any pattern exists

We end up all belonging to the same category, that of the non-young.

What had Old Joe Hunt answered when I knowingly claimed that history was the lies of the victors? "As long as you remember that it is also the self-delusions of the defeated." Do we remember that enough when it comes to our private lives?

And even when he guessed that the love stories of the misled and the forsaken had become a little less authentic with each retelling . . . even if this was the case, he was still moved. Indeed, he was more moved by the lives of the bereft and the unchosen than he was by stories of success in love.

Part of love is preparing for death. You feel confirmed in your love when she dies. You got it right. This is part of it all.

Margarita m?gdavo sakyti, kad yra dvi r?šys moter?: tos, kurios matomos kiaurai, ir tos, kurios nešioja paslapt?. Ir kad tai yra svarbiausia, k? vyrai išsyk pajunta, ir svarbiausia, kas juos patraukia arba ne. Vienus traukia vieno tipo moterys, kitus kito. Margarita - man nereikia to sakyti - buvo kiaurai matoma, bet kartais ji pavyd?davo toms, kurios nešiojo paslapt? ar apsimesdavo jos apgaubtos.

Fear: what did those who inflicted it know? They knew that it worked, even how it worked, but not what it felt like. 'The wolf cannot speak of the fear of the sheep,' as they say.

Point One. I'm not a go-between. Whatever you say stays in thisroom and it doesn't get leaked back. Point Two. I'm not a shrink, I'm not some kind of advice centre, I don't even much like listening to other people's woes. [...] Point Three. I'm just an old soak whose life hasn't worked out and who lieves alone with her dogs. So I'm not an authority on anything.

OK, then, well, are you a feminist?' She smiled at me. 'Naturally – I am a woman.