Julian Barnes Quotes

“You put together two things that have not been put together before. And the world is changed…”

“What makes us want to know the worst? Is it that we tire of preferring to know the best? Does curiosity always hurdle self-interest? Or is it, more simply, that wanting to know the worst is love's favorite perversion.”

“May you be ordinary, as the poet once wished the new-born baby.”

“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.”

“You get towards the end of life - no, not life itself, but of something else: the end of any likelihood of change in that life. You are allowed a long moment of pause, time enough to ask the question: what else have I done wrong?”

“I had wanted life not to bother me too much, and had succeeded - and how pitiful that was.”

“Had my life increased, or merely added to itself? There had been addition and subtraction in my life, but how much multiplication?”

“Later on in life, you expect a bit of rest, don't you? You think you deserve it. I did, anyway. But then you begin to understand that the reward of merit is not life's business.”

“Life seemed even more of a guessing game than usual.”

“This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn't turn out to be like Literature.”

“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 exaggerated form of pleasure.”

“There are two essential kinds of loneliness: that of not having found someone to love, and that of having been deprived of the one you did love. The first kind is worse. Nothing can compare to the loneliness of the soul in adolescence.”

“Because love is the meeting point of truth and magic. Truth, as in photography; magic, as in ballooning.”

“Perhaps love is essential because it's unnecessary.”

“When we fall in love, we hope - both egotistically and altruistically - that we shall be finally, truly seen: judged and approved. Of course, love does not always bring approval: being seen may just as well lead to a thumbs-down and a season in hell.”

“History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.”

“What you end up remembering isn't always the same as what you have witnessed.”

“Women scheme when they are weak, they lie out of fear. Men scheme when they are strong, they lie out of arrogance.”

“To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness - though if stupidity is lacking, the others are useless.”

“The greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonorably, foolishly, viciously.”

“Yes, of course we were pretentious -- what else is youth for?”

“Women were brought up to believe that men were the answer. They weren't. They weren't even one of the questions.”

“History isn't the lies of the victors, as I once glibly assured Old Joe Hunt; I know that now. It's more the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious or defeated.”

“The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly.”

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

“That's one of the central problems of history, isn't it, sir? The question of subjective versus objective interpretation, the fact that we need to know the history of the historian in order to understand the version that is being put in front of us.”

“I thought of the things that had happened to me over the years, and of how little I had made happen.”

“A pier is a disappointed bridge; yet stare at it for long enough and you can dream it to the other side of the Channel.”

“I don't believe in God, but I miss him.”

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

“When you read a great book, you don't escape from life, you plunge deeper into it.”

“We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but were only being cowardly. What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things rather than facing them.”

“Every love story is a potential grief story.”

“Mystification is simple; clarity is the hardest thing of all.”

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

“Nature is so exact, it hurts exactly as much as it is worth, so in a way one relishes the pain, I think. If it didn't matter, it wouldn't matter.”

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

“One of the troubles is this: the heart isn't heart-shaped.”

“Memory is identity…. You are what you have done; what you have done is in your memory; what you remember defines who you are; when you forget your life you cease to be, even before your death.”

“To own a certain book - and to choose it without help - is to define yourself.”

“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.”

“We live, we die, we are remembered, we are forgotten.”

“History isn't what happened, history is just what historians tell us.”

“You can put it another way, of course; you always can.”

“There is accumulation. There is responsibility. And beyond this there is great unrest.”

“It's easy, after all, not to be a writer. Most people aren't writers, and very little harm comes to them.”

“What happiness is there in just the memory of happiness?”

“You put together two things that have not been put together before. And the world is changed. People may not notice at the time, but that doesn’t matter. The world has been changed nonetheless.”

“The best life for a writer is the life which helps him write the best books he can.”

“Perhaps the world progresses not by maturing, but by being in a permanent state of adolescence, of thrilled discovery.”

“Irony - The modern mode: either the devil’s mark or the snorkel of sanity.”

“Whisky, I find, helps clarity of thought. And reduces pain. It has the additional virtue of making you drunk or, if taken in sufficient quantity, very drunk.”

“Some of the freckles I once loved are now closer to liver spots. But it’s still the eyes we look at, isn’t it? That’s where we found the other person, and find them still.”

“If a man cannot tell what he wants to do, then he must find out what he ought to do. If desire has become complicated, then hold fast to duty.”

“Remember the botched brothel-visit in L’Education sentimentale and remember its lesson. Do not participate: happiness lies in the imagination, not the act. Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory.”

“Wisdom consists partly in not pretending anymore, in discarding artifice.”

“Grief reconfigures time, its length, its texture, its function: one day means no more than the next, so why have they been picked out and given separate names?”

“This is what those who haven’t crossed the tropic of grief often fail to understand: the fact that someone is dead may mean that they are not alive, but doesn’t mean that they do not exist.”

“If you’re that clever you can argue yourself into anything.”

“How rarely do our emotions meet the object they seem to deserve? How hopelessly we signal; how dark the sky; how big the waves. We are all lost at sea, washed between hope and despair, hailing something that may never come to rescue us.”

“You lose the world for a glance? Of course you do. That is what the world is for: to lose under the right circunstances.”

“It is all just the universe doing its stuff, and we are the stuff it is being done to.”

“I’ve always thought you are what you are and you shouldn’t pretend to be anyone else. But Oliver used to correct me and explain that you are whoever it is you’re pretending to be.”

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

“Novels tell us the most truth about life: what it is, how we live it, what it might be for, how we enjoy and value it, and how we lose it.”

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