Quotes from Julian Barnes

But then we learn something else: that the brain doesm't like to be typecast. Just when you think everything is a matter of decrease, of subtraction and division, your brain, your memory, may surprise you. As it it's saying: Don't imagine you can rely on some comforting process of gradual decline--life's much more complicated than that. And so the brain will throw you scraps from time to time, even disengage those familiar memory loops.

La casa del escritor en Croisset fue derribada poco después de su muerte y reemplazada por una fábrica para la extracción de alcohol del trigo malogrado. No sería tampoco muy difícil librarse de su estatua: si un alcalde amante de las estatuas puede levantarla, otro –quizás un acérrimo defensor de la línea del partido, alguien que ha leído por encima lo que Sartre dice de Flaubert– podría retirarla celosamente.

an?msanan hazlar kadar, an?msanan ac?lar konusunda da nostaljik olmak mümkün

We were English, and so had only those morally laden English words to deal with: words like scarlet woman, and adulteress. But there was never anyone less scarlet than Susan; and, as she once told me, when she first heard people talking about adultery, she thought it referred to the watering-down of milk.

When we killed - or exiled - God we also killed ourselves. Did we notice sufficiently at the time? No God, no afterlife, no us. We were right to kill Him, of course, this long-standing imaginary friend of ours. And we weren't going to get an afterlife anyway. But we sawed off the branch we were sitting on. And the view from there, from that height - even if it was only the illusion of a view - wasn't so bad.

Qué vanidad tan curiosa es la que impulsa al presente a esperar que el pasado se amamante de él.

But aeronautics purged the sin of height, otherwise known as the sin of getting above yourself.

Nowadays we talk about transactional sex, and recreational sex. No one, back then, had recreational sex. Well, they might have done, but they didn't call it that. Back then, back there, there was love, and there was sex, and there was a commingling of the two, sometimes awkward, sometimes seamless, which sometimes worked out, and sometimes didn't.

khi ta tr? và nh?y c?m, cÅ©ng là lúc ta hay Ä'i gieo Ä'au Ä'á»›n nh?t

I don't envy the young. In my days of adolescent rage and insolence, I would ask myself: What are the old for, if not to envy the young? That seemed to me their principal and final purpose before extinction.

Back in 'my day'—though I didn't claim ownership of it at the time, still less do I now . . .

when I see pairs of young lovers, vertically entwined on street corners, or horizontally entwined on a blanket in the park, the main feeling it arouses in me is a kind of protectiveness. No, not pity: protectiveness. Not that they would want my protection. And yet—and this is curious—the more bravado they show in their behaviour, the stronger my response. I want to protect them from what the world is probably going to do to them, and from what they will probably do to one another.

His pattern of life for twenty years and more had been a demonstration of how to be impulsive and careful at the same time. And his generosity to others also came, like a pack of bacon, with a 'use by' date on it.

The title of The Raft of the Medusa, incidentally, is not The Raft of the Medusa. The painting was listed in the Salon catalogue as Scène de naufrage – Scene of Shipwreck. A cautious political move? Perhaps. But it's equally a useful instruction to the spectator: this is a painting, not an opinion. "Keeping an Eye Open".

But he knew that she used to read his diary. So he would deliberately write into it, for a date a few weeks ahead, 'Suicide'. Or, sometimes, 'Marriage

The title of The Raft of the Medusa, incidentally, is not The Raft of the Medusa. The painting was listed in the Salon catalogue as Scène de naufrage – Scene of Shipwreck. A cautious political move? Perhaps. But it's equally a useful instruction to the spectator: this is a painting, not an opinion.

drown out the noise of time, is transformed into the whisper of history. This

I know already that she and her husband have separate beds, indeed separate rooms, and their marriage has been unconsummated—or rather, sex-free—for almost twenty years; but I haven't pressed her for reasons or particulars.

You marry to continue the conversation.

Why go through that stuff all over again? Don't you know the rule: once bitten, twice bitten? But now, I found myself in revolt against my own … what? Conventionality, lack of imagination

Yes, she is older; yes, she knows more about the world. But in terms of—what shall I call it? the age of her spirit, perhaps—we aren't that far apart.

Destiny. It was just a grand term for something you could do nothing about.

Istorija yra nugal?toj? melas, tik reikia pridurti, jog tai ir nugal?t?j? saviapgaul?.

Wagner had a mean soul, and it showed. He was evil in his anti-Semitism and his other racial attitudes. Therefore he could not be a genius, for all the burnish and glitter of his music.