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"There is a grotesquerie to grief as well. You lose the sense of your existence being rational, or justifiable. You feel absurd."
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"The condition you're in at this moment is the product of your previous thoughts, to change your condition, change your thoughts."
Personal Development

"And there wasn't anything he wanted to do that he couldn't make time for. What did he have to mope about, really? What more did he want? Love, he could hear Eve saying. Purpose. Love. Purpose. Those are the things that you can't plan for. Those are the things that just happen. And what if they don't happen? Do you spend your whole life pining for them? Waiting to be happy?"

"An artist is he for whom the goal and center of life is to form his mind."

"To say something great, you must first stop trying to say something great! Sometimes struggling is an obstacle to reach the target! Flow like a river, calmly, naturally, enjoying the present moment, without thinking of the ocean and finally you will be there!"
Explore more quotes by Julian Barnes

"Books say: she did this because. Life says: she did this. Books are where things are explained to you, life where things aren't."

"You can deal with the brain, as I say; it looks sensible, whereas the heart, the human heart, I'm afraid, looks a fucking mess."

"The mechanism of natural selection depends on the survival, not of the strongest, nor the most intelligent, but of the most adaptable."

"I thought of the things that had happened to me over the years, and of how little I had made happen."

"How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but-mainly-to ourselves."

"Well, they each seem to do one thing well enough, but fail to realize that literature depends on doing several things well at the same time."

"Altitude reduces all things to their relative proportions, and to the truth. Cares, remorse, disgust become strangers: How easily indifference, contempt, forgetfulness drop away...and forgiveness descends."
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