Quotes from Julian Barnes

There was nothing to distract us from our human and filial duty, which was to study, pass exams, use those qualifications to find a job, and then put together a way of life unthreateningly fuller than that of our parents, who would approve, while privately comparing it to their own earlier lives, which had been simpler, and therefore superior. None of this, of course, was ever stated: the genteel social Darwinism of the English middle classes always remained implicit.

Istorija yra žinomyb?, atsirandanti atminties netobulum? ir dokument? netikslum? susikirtimo taške.

the hope that this activity would keep at bay the existential pain of our brief sublunary transit from birth to death.

To look at ourselves from afar, to make the subjective suddenly objective: this gives us a psychic shock.

From love's absolutism to love's absolution? No: I don't believe in the cosy narratives of life some find necessary, just as I choke on comforting words like redemption and closure. Death is the only closure I believe in; and the wound will stay open until that final shutting of the doors. As for redemption, it's far too neat, a movie-maker's bromide; and beyond that, it feels like something grand, which human beings are too imperfect to deserve, much less bestow upon themselves.

Would you rather tear up your own expressions of love, or the ones you had received?

History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.' 

We're all just looking for a place of safety. And if you don't find one, then you have to learn how to pass the time.

Things, once gone, can't be put back; he knew that now. A punch, once delivered, can't be withdrawn. Words, once spoken, can't be unsaid. We may go on as if nothing has been lost, nothing done, nothing said; we may claim to forget it all; but our innermost core doesn't forget, because we have been changed for ever.

Would you rather love the more, and suffer the more; or love the less, and suffer the less? That is, I think, finally, the only real question. Julian Barnes - The Only Story

How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but – mainly – to ourselves. Dear

Belki de her türlü ortak motifi ortadan kald?ran keder daha da fazlas?n? ortadan kald?r?yor: ortak motiflerin var olduÄŸuna olan inanc?.

Miss Fergusson had maintained, when they first stood before the haloed mountain, that there were two explanations of everything, that each required the exercise of faith, and that we had been given free will in order that we might choose between them. This dilemma was to preoccupy Miss Logan for years to come. 7

His experience of life had left him with the belief that getting through the first sixteen years or so was fundamentally a question of damage limitation.

It strikes me that this may be one of the differences between youth and age: when we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old

Happiness depends necessarily on the unreality of one plane of your life: in one area ( emotional, financial, professional ), you should be living beyond your resources.

She knew me better than anyone else in the world. And still wanted to have lunch with me. And let me go on and on about myself.

I don't want you to be a woman of mystery. I think I'd hate it. Either it's just a façade, a game, a technique for ensnaring men, or else the woman of mystery is a mystery even to herself, and that's the worst of all.

This was one of the differences between the three of us and our new friend, We were essentially taking the piss, except when we were serious. He was essentially serious, except when he was taking the piss. It took us a while to work this out.

This is where we work, in the interstices of ignorance, the land of contradiction and silence, planning to convince you with the seemingly known, to resolve - or make usefully vivid - the contradiction, and to make the silence eloquent.

deliquescent.

In a novel, all his life's anxieties, his mixture of strength and weakness, his potential for hysteria - all would have been swirled away in a vortex of love leading to the blissful calm of marriage. But one of life's many disappointments was that it was never a novel, not by Maupassant or anyone else. Well, perhaps a short satirical tale by Gogol.

Nors kartais pirmoji meil? sugildo šird?, ir kiekvienas, bandantis j? v?l atverti, neranda nieko, tik sen? rand?.

The bitch, I thought. If there was one woman in the entire world a man could fall in love with and still think life worth refusing, it was Veronica.