“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.”
Page 28.
Talking It Over (1991)
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Julian Barnes 77
English writer 1946Related quotes

The Nature, Importance and Liberties of Belief (1873)
Context: It is with the mind as it is with the body, in this respect. The physician says to a household: "Here is a great realm of food. Eat that which agrees with you. The same kinds of food do not agree with all people. If you grow healthy on the food that I loathe, that is the food for you, although it disagrees with me; and if I grow healthy on the food that you loathe, that is the food for me, although it disagrees with you." And it is very much so in the matter of believing. All cannot believe the same things, or cannot believe things in the same way.
"But," say men, "believing amounts to nothing if one man may believe one thing, and another man another thing." Well, let me ask, then, is it not possible for truth to be so large that ten men shall believe it differently, and yet each one of them so sectionally believe it, that they shall be all true though none of them has more than partial truth, and that all of them shall compass the whole truth?

“As a mother you have got to have a view for now and a view for the future.”
Redgrave: Actress and campaigner http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/2551773.stm, (6 December 2002), BBC News. accessed 17 December 2006.

The New Divinity (1964)
Context: Eventually the old ideas will no longer serve, the old ideological framework can no longer be tinkered up to bear the weight of the facts, and a radical reconstruction becomes necessary, leading eventually to the emergence of a quite new organisation of thought and belief, just as the emergence of new types of bodily organization was necessary to achieve biological advance. Such major organizations of thought may be necessary in science as much as in religion. The classical example, of course, was the re-patterning of cosmological thought which demoted the earth from its central position and led to the replacement of the geocentric pattern of thought by a heliocentric one. I believe that an equally drastic reorganization of our pattern of religious thought is now becoming necessary, from a god-centered to an evolutionary-centered pattern.

Captain Richard Sharpe and Miss Sarah Fry, p. 205
Sharpe (Novel Series), Sharpe's Escape (2003)

“It's so beautifully arranged on the plate - you know someone's fingers have been all over it.”