Quotes by Julian Barnes

“Was this their exact exchange? Almost certainly not. Still, it is my best memory of their exchange.”

“When you are in your twenties, even if you're confused and uncertain about your aims and purposes, you have a strong sense of what life itself is, and of what you in life are, and might become. Lat...”

“...I need to return briefly to a few incidents that have grown into anecdotes, to some approximate memories which time has deformed into certainty.”

“I remember, in no particular order:a shiny inner wrist;steam rising from a wet sink as a hot frying pan is laughingly tossed into it;gouts of sperm circling a plughole, before being sluiced down th...”

“I blushed. You haven't seen a bald man in his sixties blush? Oh, it happens, just as it does to a hairy, spotty fifteen-year-old. And because it's rarer, it sends the blusher tumbling back to that ...”

“But I don't remember. I won't remember. Memory is an act of will, and so is forgetting.”

“If you remember your past too well you start blaming your present for it. Look what they did to me, that's what caused me to be like this, it's not my fault. Permit me to correct you: it probably i...”

“Back then, things were plainer: less money, no electronic devices, little fashion tyranny, no girlfriends. There was nothing to distract us from our human and filial duty which was to study, pass e...”

“For the point is this: not that myth refers us back to some original event which has been fancifully transcribed as it passed through collective memory; but that it refers us forward to something t...”

“[Flaubert] didnt just hate the railway as such; he hated the way it flattered people with the illusion of progress. What was the point of scientific advance without moral advance? The railway would...”

“You can define a net two ways, depending on your point of view. Normally you would say it is a meshed instrument designed to catch fish. But you could, with no great injury to logic, reverse the im...”

“Altitude reduces all things to their relative proportions, and to the truth. Cares, remorse, disgust become strangers: How easily indifference, contempt, forgetfulness drop away...and forgiveness d...”

“(on grief) And you do come out of it, thats true. After a year, after five. But you dont come out of it like a train coming out of a tunnel, bursting through the downs into sunshine and that swift,...”

“There is a grotesquerie to grief as well. You lose the sense of your existence being rational, or justifiable. You feel absurd.”

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

“Perhaps grief, which destroys all patterns, destroys even more: the belief that any patterns exist. But we cannot, I think, survive without such belief. So each of us must pretend to find, or re-er...”

“The final tormenting, unanswerable question: what is 'success' in mourning?”

“Reading is a majority skill but a minority art.”

“When you are in your twenties, if even if you're confused and uncertain about your aims and purposes, you have a strong sense of what life itself is, and of what you in life are, and might become.”

“I didn't doubt for a moment that she had read them all, or that they were the right books to own. Further, they seemed to be an organic combination of her mind and personality, whereas mine struck ...”