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Julian Barnes Quotes | Quotes said by Julian Barnes

  • Julian Barnes Quote #1

    (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 swift, rattling descent to the Channel; you come out of it as a gull comes out of an oil-slick. You are tarred and feathered for life.

  • Julian Barnes Quote #2

    ... forty's nothing, at fifty you're in your prime, sixty's the new forty, and so on.

  • Julian Barnes Quote #3

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

  • Julian Barnes Quote #4

    ..books look as if they contain knowledge, while e-readers look as if they contain information.

  • Julian Barnes Quote #5

    [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 would merely permit more people to move about, meet and be stupid together.

  • Julian Barnes Quote #6

    Šeimynines laimes paslapti sudaro ne jos pilnumas ar bent jau ne gyvenimas kartu su visais jos nariais

  • Julian Barnes Quote #7

    5.4 The question of accumulation. If life is a wager, what form does it take? At the racetrack, an accumulator is a bet which rolls on profits from the success of one of the horse to engross the stake on the next one.
    5.5 So a) To what extent might human relationships be expressed in a mathematical or logical formula? And b) If so, what signs might be placed between the integers?Plus and minus, self-evidently; sometimes multiplication, and yes, division. But these sings are limited. Thus an entirely failed relationship might be expressed in terms of both loss/minus and division/ reduction, showing a total of zero; whereas an entirely successful one can be represented by both addition and multiplication. But what of most relationships? Do they not require to be expressed in notations which are logically improbable and mathematically insoluble?
    5.6 Thus how might you express an accumulation containing the integers b, b, a (to the first), a (to the second), s, v?
    B = s - v (*/+) a (to the first)
    Or
    a (to the second) + v + a (to the first) x s = b
    5.7 Or is that the wrong way to put the question and express the accumulation? Is the application of logic to the human condition in and of itself self-defeating? What becomes of a chain of argument when the links are made of different metals, each with a separate frangibility?
    5.8 Or is link a false metaphor?
    5.9 But allowing that is not, if a link breaks, wherein lies the responsibility for such breaking? On the links immediately on the other side, or on the whole chain? But what do you mean by the whole chain? How far do the limits of responsibility extend?
    6.0 Or we might try to draw the responsibility more narrowly and apportion it more exactly. And not use equations and integers but instead express matters in the traditional narrative terminology. So, for instance, if.... - Adrian Finn

  • Julian Barnes Quote #8

    A pier is a disappointed bridge.

  • Julian Barnes Quote #9

    After a long analysis of Robson’s 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 population, had decided it was his ethical duty to keep the planet’s numbers constant.

  • Julian Barnes Quote #10

    And perhaps it was also the case that, for all a lifetime's internal struggling, you were finally no more than what others saw you as. That was your nature, whether you liked it or not.

  • Julian Barnes Quote #11

    And that was all the part of it - the way you were obliged to live. You stifled a groan, you lied about your love, you deceived your legal wife, and all in the name of honour. That was the damned paradox of it - in order to behave well, you have to behave badly.

  • Julian Barnes Quote #12

    And what percentage of people take up the option to die off?’ She looked at me, her glance telling me to be calm. ‘Oh, a hundred per cent, of course. Over many thousands of years, calculated by old time, of course. But yes, everyone takes the option, sooner or later.’

    ‘So it’s just like the first time round? You always die in the end?’

    ‘Yes, except don’t forget the quality of life here is much better. People die when they decide they’ve had enough, not before. The second time round it’s altogether more satisfying because it’s willed.’ She paused, then added, ‘As I say, we cater for what people want.’

    I hadn’t been blaming her. I’m not that sort. I just wanted to find out how the system worked. ‘So … even people, religious people, who come here to worship God throughout eternity … they end up throwing in the towel after a few years, hundred years, thousand years?’

    ‘Certainly. As I said, there are still a few Old Heaveners around, but their numbers are diminishing all the time.

  • Julian Barnes Quote #13

    And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us of time's malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing - until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return.

  • Julian Barnes Quote #14

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

  • Julian Barnes Quote #15

    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 exams, use those qualifications to find a job, and then put together a way of life unthreateningly fuller than that of our parents, who would approve, while privately comparing it to their own earlier lives, which had been simpler, and therefore superior.

  • Julian Barnes Quote #16

    Be to, tas skausmas truko neilgai. Kaip minejau, turiu stipru savisaugos instinkta. Man pavyko išstumti Veronika iš širdies ir iš gyvenimo

  • Julian Barnes Quote #17

    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 wearing us down, by proving, however long it takes, that life isn´t all it´s cracked up to be.

  • Julian Barnes Quote #18

    Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't. I'm not surprised some people prefer books. Books make sense of life. The only problem is that the lives they make sense of are other people's lives, never your own.

  • Julian Barnes Quote #19

    Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't. I'm not surprised some people prefer books.

  • Julian Barnes Quote #20

    Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't. I'm not surprised some people prefer books. Books make sense of life. The only problem is that the lives they make sense of are other people's lives, never your own.

  • Julian Barnes Quote #21

    But art and religion will always shadow one another through the abstract nouns they both invoke: truth, seriousness, imagination, sympathy, morality, transcendence.

  • Julian Barnes Quote #22

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

  • Julian Barnes Quote #23

    But life never lets you go, does it? You can't put down life the way you put down a book.

  • Julian Barnes Quote #24

    Does character develop over time? In novels, of course it does:otherwise there wouldn't be much of a story. But in life? I sometimes wonder. Our attitudes and opinions change we develop new habits and eccentricities; but that's something different, more like decoration. Perhaps character resembles intelligence, except that the character peaks a little later
    ;between twenty and thirty, say. And after that we're just stuck with what we've got. We're on our own. If so, that would explain a lot of lives, wouldn't it? And also if this isn't too grand a word--our tragedy.

  • Julian Barnes Quote #25

    Everything in art depends on execution: the story of a louse can be as beautiful as the story of Alexander. You must write according to your feelings, be sure those feelings are true, and let everything else go hang. When a line is good it ceases to belong to any school. A line of prose must be as immutable as a line of poetry.

  • Julian Barnes Quote #26

    Everything you invent is true: you can be sure of that. Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.

  • Julian Barnes Quote #27

    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 that will happen, that must happen. Myth will become reality, however sceptical we might be.

  • Julian Barnes Quote #28

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

  • Julian Barnes Quote #29

    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. Instead they seem like weather, like clouds constantly re-forming into new shapes, blown by nameless, unidentifiable winds.

  • Julian Barnes Quote #30

    He didn’t really like travel, of course. He liked the idea of travel, and the memory of travel, but not travel itself.

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