Quotes by Julian Barnes

“He always thought that Touie's long illness would somehow prepare him for her death. He always imagined that grief anf guilt, if they followed, would be more clear-edged, more defined, more finite....”

“Life versus Death becomes, as Montaigne pointed out, Old Age versus Death.”

“If the writer were more like a reader, he’d be a reader, not a writer. It’s as uncomplicated as that.”

“The imagination doesn’t crop annually like a reliable fruit tree. The writer has to gather whatever’s there: sometimes too much, sometimes too little, sometimes nothing at all. And in the years of ...”

“And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability.”

“Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time.”

“Is there anything more plausible than a second hand?”

“[Flaubert] didn’t 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 woul...”

“Pride makes us long for a solution to things – a solution, a purpose, a final cause; but the better telescopes become, the more stars appear.”

“The best form of government is one that is dying, because that means it’s giving way to something else.”

“Music — good music, great music — had a hard, irreducible purity to it. It might be bitter and despairing and pessimistic, but it could never be cynical. If music is tragic, those with asses’ ears ...”

“Love is just a system for getting someone to call you Darling after sex.”

“you find yourself repeating, ‘They grow up so quickly, don’t they?’ when all you really mean is: time goes faster for me nowadays.”

“Life … is a bit like reading. … If all your responses to a book have already been duplicated and expanded upon by a professional critic, then what point is there to your reading? Only that it’s you...”

“When you read a great book, you don’t escape from life, you plunge deeper into it. There may be a superficial escape – into different countries, mores, speech patterns – but what you are essentiall...”

“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, that’s true. After a year, after five. But you don’t come out of it like a train coming out of a tunnel, bursting through the downs into sunshine and that swif...”

“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.”

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