Quotes from Julian Barnes

Which are truer, the happy memories, or the unhappy ones? He decided, eventually, that the question was unanswerable.

At the end of my first year at university, I was at home for three months, visibly and unrepentantly bored. Those of the same age today will find it hard to imagine the laboriousness of communication back then. Most of my friends were far-flung, and—by some unexpressed but clear parental mandate—use of the telephone was discouraged. A letter, and then a letter in reply. It was all slow-paced, and lonely.

This last isn't something I actually saw, but what you end up remembering isn't always the same as what you have witnessed.

And if that was so, then perhaps the argument could be extended. For example, to say that you had once been happy, and to believe what you were saying, was the same as actually to have been happy. Could that be true? No, that was surely specious. On the other hand, the emotional record was not like a history book; its truths were constantly changing, and true even when incompatible.

One secret of the Christian religion's success was always to employ the best moviemakers

even if he did sometimes flirt lightly with Betty of Betty's Best Home-Made Pies. It passed the time. Ah, that phrase. A sudden memory of Susan talking about Joan. "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." Back then, it had sounded like a counsel of despair; now, it struck him as normal, and emotionally practical.

Treba paziti kuda se ide samo ako se želi vratiti tamo odakle se pošlo,...

And while he was tormenting himself, here was a question he would often arrive at when his mind followed a particular trail of memory. Handing back Susan had been an act of self-protection on his part. There was no doubt about that; and no doubt in his mind that he had to do it. But beyond this, was it an act of courage, or of cowardice? And if he couldn't decide, perhaps the answer was: both.

History is a raw onion sandwich, sir." "For what reason?" "It just repeats, sir. It burps. We've seen it again and again this year. Same old story, same old oscillation between tyranny and rebellion, war and peace, prosperity and impoverishment.

His grandfather had white peacocks roosting in a catalpa tree.

Loši snovi ne daju ostatku života da ide dalje.

Susan had pointed out that everyone has their love story. Even if it was a fiasco, even if it fizzled out, never got going, had all been in the mind to begin with: that didn't make it any the less real. And it was the only story.

This was another skill women were meant to learn: when a man's story had come to an end. Mostly, it wasn't a problem, as the end was thumpingly obvious; or else the narrator started snorting with laughter in advance, which was always a pretty good clue. Martha had long ago decided only to laugh at things she found funny. It seemed a normal sort of rule; but most men found it rebuking.

the imagination's first duty was to be transgressive

What could be put up against the noise of time? Only that music which is inside ourselves – the music of our being – which is transformed by some into real music. Which, over the decades, if it is strong and true and pure enough to drown out the noise of time, is transformed into the whisper of history.

So now he better understood how couples clung to their own story—each, often, to a separate part of it—long after it had gone cold on them, even to the point where they were not sure they could bear one another. Bad love still contained the remnant, the memory, of good love—somewhere, deep down, where neither of them any longer wanted to dig.

Commerce, Voltaire declared, was the base on which the greatness of our nation was built; now it's all that keeps us from going bankrupt.

time's many paradoxes. 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.

The government had been talking about sexually transmitted disease. But it was the same with words: they too could be sexually transmitted.

We tend to slot any new relationship we come across into a preexisting category. We see what is general or common about it; whereas the participants see—feel—only what is individual and particular to them.

Jenže vzpomínky, které nám nakonec z?stanou, se pÃ…â"¢ece pokaždé neshodují s tím, co jsme vidÄ›li na vlastní o?i.

And then there is the inevitable third stylisation—of posthumous memory. Leading to the moment when the last living person to remember you has their very last thought about you. There ought to be a name for that final event, which marks your final extinction.

Not a touch, not a kiss, not a word, let alone a scheme or a plan. But there was already, just in the way we sat in the car, before she said a few laughing words and then walked off up her driveway, a complicity between us. Not, I insist, as yet a complicity to do anything. Just a complicity which made me a little more me, and her a little more her.

It was always my mother who policed me. My father was milder, and less given to judgement. He preferred to allow things to blow over, to let sleeping dogs lie, not to stir up mud; whereas my mother preferred facing facts and not brushing things under the carpet. My parents' marriage, to my unforgiving nineteen-year-old eye, was a car crash of cliché. Though I would have to admit, as the one making the judgement, that a "car crash of cliché" is itself a cliché.