Quotes from Julian Barnes

Cast out the beam from your own eye before you seek to extract the mote from the eye of another.

Her diction was formal, her sentence structure entirely grammatical—indeed, you could almost hear the commas, semicolons and full stops.

He survived to tell the tale"—that's what people say, don't they? History isn't the lies of the victors, as I once glibly assured Old Joe Hunt; I know that now. It's more the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious nor defeated.

Early on, she had told him, tenderly, that she had been attracted to him because he was pure and open. But if this didn't make her love him as much as he loved her, then he wished it were otherwise. Not that he felt pure and open. They sounded like words designed to keep him in a box

Monoglot, the sign of an enclosed and self-deluding country.

I didn't want to press Veronica. I thought I'd wait for her to get in touch this time. I checked my inbox rather too assiduously. Of course, I wasn't expecting a great effusion, but hoped, perhaps, for a polite message that it had been nice to see me properly after all these years. Well, perhaps it hadn't been. Perhaps she'd gone on a trip. Perhaps her server was down. Who said that thing about the eternal hopefulness of the human heart?

Pase lo que pase –escribió Flaubert cuando estalló la guerra franco-prusiana–, seguiremos siendo unos estúpidos.» ¿Simple pesimismo jactancioso? ¿O se trata de la necesaria aceleración de las expectativas, cuando aún no se puede pensar, actuar o escribir adecuadamente?

Gustave's last years are arid and solitary. He

He applauded their idealism. And yes, music might be immortal, but composers alas are not.

your lovemaking has become less a search for consolation than a hopeless attempt to deny your mutual unhappiness.

El amor, por su propia naturaleza, era perturbador, cataclísmico; y, si no, no era amor.

Vivimos en el tiempo —nos contiene y nos moldea—, pero nunca he creído comprenderlo muy bien.

Razumem da u tom svesnom skretanju pogleda može biti i ne?eg pozitivnog: lakše je gurati dalje ako ne prime?ujete neprijatne stvari. Ali, ako ne prime?ujete neprijatne stvari, na kraju ?ete poverovati da do njih nikad i ne dolazi. Uvek vas iznenade.

La verdad no es amable. Lo descubrirás muy pronto cuando la vida te vapulee.

Lenin found music depressing. Stalin thought he understood and appreciated music. Khrushchev despised music. Which is the worst for a composer?

Habíamos juzgado filosóficamente evidente que el suicidio era un derecho de cualquier persona libre: un acto lógico frente a una enfermedad terminal o la senilidad; una acción heroica frente a la tortura o la muerte evitable de otros; un acto elegante en la rabia del amor contrariado.

How do we seize the past? Can we ever do so?

Yo no estaba capacitado para saber cómo comportarme socialmente en la mesa de un hombre de cuya mujer estaba enamorado.

De haber vivido, ¿habría disfrutado de la vida, como la mayoría hacemos o intentamos hacer? Quizá; o tal vez habría albergado culpa y remordimiento por no haber sabido acoplar sus actos con sus argumentos.

We live as if nature and nurture were equal parents when the evidence suggests that nature has both the whip hand and the whip.

The parrot/writer feebly accepts language as something received, imitative and inert

Es menos el recuerdo de un suceso que el recuerdo de una fotografía del suceso. Y hoy día, como hemos perdido altura, precisión, foco, ya no confiamos tanto en la fotografía como en otra época. Las viejas instantáneas de tiempos más felices parecen haberse vuelto menos primarias, menos fotografías de la vida misma y más fotografías de fotografías. O, dicho de otro modo, tu recuerdo de tu vida —tu vida anterior

Goethe, than whom few of us can hope to live a fuller or more interesting life, stated on his deathbed – he was eighty-two at the time – that he had only ever felt happiness in his life for one quarter of an hour.

Happiness is like the pox. Catch it too soon, and it wrecks your constitution