Julian Barnes Quotes - Page 4

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

Does history repeat itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce? No, that's too grand, too considered a process. History just burps, and we taste again that raw-onion sandwich it swallowed centuries ago.

If these are indeed the spirits of Englishmen and Englishwomen who have passed over into the next world, surely they would know how to form a proper queue?

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.

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

When you are writing fiction your task is to reflect the fullest complications of the world

Time...give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.

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

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

We live with such easy assumptions, don't we? For instance, that memory equals events plus time. But it's all much odder than this. Who was it said that memory is what we thought we'd forgotten? And it ought to be obvious to us that time doesn't act as a fixative, rather as a solvent. But it's not convenient--- it's not useful--- to believe this; it doesn't help us get on with our lives; so we ignore it.

The ways in which a book, once read, stays (and changes) in the reader's mind are unpredictable.

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

Sometimes you find the panel, but it doesn’t open; sometimes it opens, and your gaze meets nothing but a mouse skeleton. But at least you’ve looked. That’s the real distinction between people: not between those who have secrets and those who don’t, but between those who want to know everything and those who don’t. This search is a sign of love I maintain.

He feared me as many men fear women: because their mistresses (or their wives) understand them. They are scarcely adult, some men: they wish women to understand them, and to that end they tell them all their secrets; and then, when they are properly understood, they hate their women for understanding them.

Most people, in my opinion, steal much of what they are. If they didn't what poor items they would be.

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

Perhaps love is essential because it's unnecessary.

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

Global warming is more of a blessing than a curse.

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.

You can define a net two ways, depending on your point of view. Normally you would say it is a meshed instrument designed to catch fish. But you could, with no great injury to logic, reverse the image and define the net as a jocular lexicographer once did: he called it a collection of holes tied together with string.

we must be precise with love, its language and its gestures. If it is to save us, we must look at it as clearly as we should learn to look at death

The next day, when I was sober, I thought again about the three of us, and about time's many paradoxes. For instance: that when we are young and sensitive, we are also at our most hurtful; whereas when the blood begins to slow, when we feel less sharply, when we are more armoured and have learnt how to bear hurt, we tread more carefully.

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.

It took me some years to clear my head of what Paris wanted me to admire about it, and to notice what I preferred instead. Not power-ridden monuments, but individual buildings which tell a quieter story: the artist's studio, or the Belle Epoque house built by a forgotten financier for a just-remembered courtesan.