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"There is violence in this supposedly tender heart of mine."
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"There is nothing inherently painful about being cheated on."

"I Have Confidence in Love, And Most of the Time I doubt it."

"It gives a fella relief to tell, but it jus' spreads out his sin."

"There is a resemblance between men and women, not a contrast. When a man begins to recognize his feeling, the two unite. When men accept the sensitive side of themselves, they come alive."

"She liked the idea so well that she felt there must be something bordering on sin involved in it."

"I lost my illusions in a black rain of bitterness - now what do you see in my eyes? How can you still love me? How can I be tender? ..."

"Adam is crying and somewhere inside of me I am crying, too, because I'm feeling things at last. I'm feeling not just the physical pain, but all that I have lost, and it is profound and catastrophic and will leave a crater in me that nothing will ever fill."
Explore more quotes by Julian Barnes

"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."

"Perhaps this was one of the tragedies life plots for us: it is our destiny to become in old age what in youth we would have most despised."

"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."

"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."

"When I was still quite young I had a complete presentiment of life. It was like the nauseating smell of cooking escaping from a ventilator: you don't have to have eaten it to know that it would make you throw up."

"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."

"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."

"Our parents thought we might be corrupted by one another into becoming whatever it was they most feared: an incorrigible masturbator, a winsome homosexual, a recklessly impregnatory libertine. On our behalf they dreaded the closeness of adolescent friendship, the predatory behaviour of strangers on trains, the lure of the wrong kind of girl. How far their anxieties outran our experience."

"Throw off your grief,' doubters imply, 'and we can all go back to pretending death doesn't exist, or at least is comfortably far away."
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