Quotes from Julian Barnes

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.

The truth was that nobody ever arrived without invitation, and all that tidying and wiping was performed out of what struck me as deep social atavism

I was also gone in a sense that I was transformed, made over. You know that story of the man who wakes up and finds he's turned into a beetle? I was the beetle who woke up and saw the possibility of being a man.

Throw off your grief,' such doubters imply, 'and we can all go back to pretending that death doesn't exist, or at least is comfortably far away.

That's one of the things about life. 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.

No sooner do we come into this world,' said Flaubert, 'than bits of us start to fall off.

The past is the present's toy and plaything, gratifyingly unable to answer back.

So what have you got for me?' And I would smile, and do my best to gratify her curiosity, to make her laugh, to report from a world of failed marriages, successful children and a peripatetic career.

The times we did, I would be hit by a sense of what I can only call pre-guilt: the expectation that she was going to say or do something that would make me feel properly guilty.

There was something a bit sinister about Noah's devotion to God; creepy, if you know what I mean.

Try as I could -which wasn't very hard- I rarely ended up fantasising a markedly different life from the one that has been mine. I don't this is complacency; it's more likely a lack of imagination, or ambition, or something. I suppose the truth is that, yes, I'm not odd enough not to have done the things I've ended up doing with my life.

To be a stoic in an age of self-pity is to be judged standoffish; worse, unfeeling.

Dear Adrian – or rather, Dear Adrian and Veronica (hello, Bitch, and welcome to this letter)

There can be a complacency to failure as much as a complacency to success.

But time … how time first grounds us and then confounds us. We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but were only being cowardly. What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things rather than facing them. Time … give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.

the small pleasures and large dullnesses of home.

The panic takes some to God, others to despair, some to charitable works, others to drink, some to emotional oblivion, others to a life where they hope that nothing serious will ever trouble them again.

Weet je wat het is - de natuur is heel precies, het doet precies zoveel pijn als het waard is, dus beleef je in zekere zin, denk ik, genoegen aan de pijn. Als het er niet toe deed, zou het er niet toe doen.

Vivimos como si la memoria fuese una consigna de equipajes bien construida y atendida por un personal eficiente.

was my closest friend, and continued so for many years. He was the gentlest of us, the most thoughtful, the one who put most trust in others. And—perhaps because of these very qualities—he was the one who had most trouble with girls and, later, women. Was there something about his softness, and his inclination to forgive, which almost provoked bad behaviour in others? I wish I knew the answer to that, not least because of the time I let him down badly. I

He didn't go to church. He read The Times and the Telegraph. He had been friendly and polite with me, but also sarcastic and rude; mainly, I would say, indifferent. He seemed to be cross with life.

And then there is the question, on which so much depends, of how we react to the damage: whether we admit it or repress it, and how this affects our dealings with others. Some admit the damage, and try to mitigate it; some spend their lives trying to help others who are damaged; and then there are those whose main concern is to avoid further damage to themselves, at whatever cost. And those are the ones who are ruthless, and the ones to be careful of.

What you fail to do is look ahead, and then imagine yourself looking back from that future point. Learning the new emotions that time brings. Discovering, for example, that as the witnesses to your life diminish, there is less corroboration, and therefore less certainty, as to what you are or have been. Even if you have assiduously kept records -- in words, sound, pictures -- you may find that you have attended to the wrong kind of record-keeping.

To je ono Å¡to ne valja na ovom svetu, pomislila je. Digli smo ruke od osmatranja.