Quotes by Julian Barnes

“Because just as all political and historical change sooner or later disappoints, so does adulthood. So does life. Sometimes I think the purpose of life is to reconcile us to its eventual loss by we...”

“In those years before mobile phones, email and Skype, travelers depended on the rudimentary communications system known as the postcard. Other methods--the long-distance phone call, the telegram--w...”

“Mariac tells us about the books he's read, the painters he's liked, the plays he's seen. He finds himself by looking in the works of others. He defines his own faith by a passionate anger against G...”

“Not merely hope, but any burdensome yearning: ambition, hatred, love (especially love) - how rarely do our emotions meet the object they seem to deserve? How hopelessly we signal; how dark the sky;...”

“I am more optimistic, both about reading and about books. There will always be non-readers, bad readers, lazy readers there always were. Reading is a majority skill but a minority art. Yet nothing...”

“What was the point of scientific advance without moral advance? The railway would merely permit more people to move about, meet and be stupid together”

“My brother distrusts the essential truth of memories; I distrust the way we colour them in. We each have our own cheap-mail-order paintbox, and our favourite hues. Thus, I remembered Grandma a few ...”

“Love may not lead where we think or hope, but regardless of outcome it should be a call to seriousness and truth. If it is not that - if it is not moral in its effect - then love is no more than an...”

“Cut privet still smells of sour apples, as it did when I was sixteen; but this is a rare, lingering exception. At that age, everything seemed more open to analogy, to metaphor, than it does now. Th...”

“Arthur was frequently baffled by the complacency with which people went on with what they insouciantly called their lives, as if both the word and the thing made perfect sense to them.”

“When you are young, you think that the old lament the deterioration of life because this makes it easier for them to die without regret. When you are old, you become impatient with the way in which...”

“How do we seize the past? Can we ever do so? When I was a medical student some pranksters at the end-of-the-term dance released into the hall a piglet which had been smeared with grease. It squirme...”

“Memories of childhood were the dreams that stayed with you after you woke.”

“The past is a distant, receding coastline, and we are all in the same boat. Along the stern rail there is a line of telescopes; each brings the shore into focus at a given distance. If the boat is ...”

“Games are for childhood, and sometimes I think I lost my childhood young.”

“I would have to go back into my past and deal with Adrian. My philosopher friend, who gazed on life and decided that any responsible, thinking individual should have the right to reject this gift t...”

“After a long analysis of Robsons suicide, we concluded that it could only be considered philosophical in an arithmetical sense of the term: he, being about to cause an increase of one in the human ...”

“His air of failure had nothing desperate about it; rather, it seemed to stem from an unresented realisation that he was not cut out for success, and his duty was therefore to ensure only that he fa...”

“There is violence in this supposedly tender heart of mine.”

“Memory is identity. I have believed this since oh, since I can remember. You are what you have done; what you have done is in your memory; what you remember defines who you are; when you forget yo...”