top of page
.png){kind=small}
"Arthur was frequently baffled by the complacency with which people went on with what they insouciantly called their lives, as if both the word and the thing made perfect sense to them."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Society quotes
"Generally speaking, our prisoners were capable of loving animals, and if they had been allowed they would have delighted to rear large numbers of domestic animals and birds in the prison. And I wonder what other activity could better have softened and refined their harsh and brutal natures than this. But it was not allowed. Neither the regulations nor the nature of the prison made it possible."
"The downside of my celebrity is that I cannot go anywhere in the world without being recognized. It is not enough for me to wear dark sunglasses and a wig. The wheelchair gives me away."
"A lot of attention has been given over to the Catholic Churches sexual abuse of children in their care, but this attention seems to have been hijacked by the media and has overshadowed the many thousands of victims that endured physical abuse."
"I think I can speak for every Senator, saying that he or she ran for the Senate because we want to help make this a better place; that is, we want to help our States and help America."
"Though the earth contains greater energy and mass than any single being, linked together, "people make the world go-round"."
"The point I am making is that in the more primitive forms of society the individual is merely a unit; in more developed forms of society he is an independent personality."
"Men have hitherto treated women like birds which have strayed down to them from the heights; as something more delicate, more fragile, more savage, stranger, sweeter, soulful " but as something which has to be caged up so that it shall not fly away."
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."
bottom of page