Quotes from Julian Barnes

How could I possibly be a better person without her than with her? Later, I thought: but he is just echoing Nietzsche's line about what doesn't kill us making us stronger. And as it happens, I have long considered this epigram particularly specious. There are many things that fail to kill us but weaken us for ever. Look around at those emotionally damaged by mere ordinary life.

I'd read somewhere that if you want to make people pay attention to what you're saying, you don't raise your voice but lower it: this is what really commands attention.

d) (1850) «De vez en cuando, en las ciudades, abro un periódico. Tengo la sensación de que todo avanza rápidamente. No estamos bailando sobre un volcán, sino sobre las tablas de una letrina, que a mí me huele bastante a podrido. Próximamente, la sociedad se precipitará en la mierda de diecinueve siglos, y se ahogará rápidamente en ella. Se oirán muchos gritos.»

Mortality often gatecrashes my consciousness when the outside world presents an obvious parallel: as evening falls, as the days shorten, or towards the end of a long day's hiking.

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.

Who can control how much they love? If you can control it, then it isn't love. I don't know what you call it instead, but it isn't love.

First love fixes a life for ever: this much I have discovered over the years. It may not outrank subsequent loves, but they will always be affected by its existence. It may serve as model, or as counterexample. It may overshadow subsequent loves; on the other hand, it can make them easier, better. Though sometimes, first love cauterizes the heart, and all any searcher will find thereafter is scar tissue.

We all know objective truth is not obtainable, that when some event occurs we shall have a multiplicity of subjective truths which we assess and then fabulate into history, into some God-eyed version of what 'really' happened.

Khrennikov had an average ear for music, but perfect pitch when it came to power.

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.

I thought—at some level of my being, I actually thought—that I could go back to the beginning and change things. That I could make the blood flow backwards. I had the vanity to imagine—even if I didn't put it more strongly than this—that I could make Veronica like me again, and that it was important to do so.

I began to feel a more general remorse – a feeling somewhere between self-pity and self-hatred – about my whole life. All of it. I had lost the friends of my youth. I had lost the love of my wife. I had abandoned the ambitions I had entertained. I had wanted life not to bother me too much, and had succeeded – and how pitiful that was.

This is true, and defines the lostness of the grief struck. You constantly report things, so that the loved one 'knows'. You may be aware that you are fooling yourself (though, if aware, are at the same time not fooling yourself), yet you continue. And everything you do, or might achieve thereafter, is thinner, weaker, matters less. There is no echo coming back; no texture, no resonance, no depth of field.

It's a recurrent delusion that a change of government will make a difference.

Art outlasts individual whim, family pride, society's orthodoxy; art always has time on its side.

There was another thing. It was a job below his qualifications. Not that he didn't take it seriously; he did. But since, professionally, he had now lowered his expectations, he found that he was rarely disappointed.

Ljudi kažu da je život prava stvar ali ja više volim ?itanje.

For instance: that when we are young and sensitive, we are also at our most hurtful; whereas when the blood begins to slow, when we feel less sharply, when we are more armoured and have learnt how to bear hurt, we tread more carefully.

mie mi se pare ca romancierii care isi socotesc scrisul o unealt? pus? în slujba politicii dezonoreaz? literatura È™i înal?? în sl?vi, prosteÈ™te, politica...scriitorul care -È™i închipuie c? romanul este calea cea mai direct? prin care intr? în politic? este de regul? un romancier prost, un jurnalist prost È™i un politician lamentabil

It seemed that Soviet power had finally decided to love him; and he had never felt a clammier embrace.

Another piece of appropriated maternal wisdom I remember from this time was this: "If you lower your expectations, you can't be disappointed." This struck me as a dismal approach to life, whether for a forty-five-year-old mother or a twenty-year-old daughter.

Apropo, cum preferati, autodistrugerea prin lipsa cunoasterii sau prin acumularea cunoasterii de sine?

once, they had their love story. Everyone does. It's the only story.

Flaubert: encerrar y sojuzgar al gran escritor, al gran burgués, al terror, al enemigo, al sabio. Un ataque al corazón puso punto final al primer proyecto; la ceguera abrevió el segundo.