Julian Barnes: Trending quotes

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Julian Barnes: 154 quotes3 likes

“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?”

Julian Barnes

Source: Levels of Life

“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.”

Julian Barnes

Source: Levels of Life

“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.”

Julian Barnes

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

Julian Barnes

Source: Levels of Life

“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.”

Julian Barnes

Source: Levels of Life

“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.”

Julian Barnes book Talking It Over

Source: Talking It Over

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

Julian Barnes book Flaubert's Parrot

Source: Flaubert's Parrot

“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.”

Julian Barnes book The Sense of an Ending

Source: The Sense of an Ending

“There's nothing wrong with being a genius who can fascinate the young. Rather, there's something wrong with the young who can't be fascinated by a genius.”

Julian Barnes book The Sense of an Ending

Source: The Sense of an Ending

“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 failed in the correct and acceptable fashion.”

Julian Barnes book Flaubert's Parrot

Source: Flaubert's Parrot

“I read Hemingway's posthumous Paris memoirs, rumoured to have been written by his wife (`Out of the question,' Toni assured me, `they're so badly written they must be authentic').”

Julian Barnes book Metroland

Page 85.
Metroland (1981)

“Now, Stuart, as you will discover if you have not done so already, believes that the principal raison d'etre of food is to conceal from public view the hideous pattern on the plate beneath.”

Julian Barnes book Talking It Over

Page 28.
Talking It Over (1991)

“You need one of those slave-driving old studio bosses if you ask me, not a sensitive graduate who went into movies because he liked the clouds in Antonioni and then turned himself into a nouvelle vague Deutscher all hot for Truthspiel.”

Julian Barnes book A History of the World in 10½ Chapters

Page 194.
See wikipedia on Michelangelo Antonioni.
A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters (1989)

“This is I have to admit, one murky compartment of the female psyche which has yet to benefit from the oven-scourer of Reason.”

Julian Barnes book Talking It Over

Page 43.
Talking It Over (1991)