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"You may say, But wasn't this the Sixties? Yes, but only for some people, only in certain parts of the country."
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"This advice, although good, was totally inapplicable to my case."
"When we are dealing with human beings, no truth has reality by itself; it is always dependent upon the reality of the immediate relationship."
"You may say, But wasn't this the Sixties? Yes, but only for some people, only in certain parts of the country."
"The time we are living in has its own conditions, peculiarities and standards."
Explore more quotes by Julian Barnes
"If a memory wasn't a thing but a memory of a memory of a memory, mirrors set in parallel, then what the brain told you now about what it claimed had happened then would be coloured by what had happened in between. It was like a country remembering its history: the past was never just the past, it was what made the present able to live with itself."
"Memory is identity. I have believed this since " oh, since I can remember. You are what you have done; what you have done is in your memory; what you remember defines who you are; when you forget your life you cease to be, even before your death."
"If you remember your past too well you start blaming your present for it. Look what they did to me, that's what caused me to be like this, it's not my fault. Permit me to correct you: it probably is your fault. And kindly spare me the details."
"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."
"Music - good music, great music - had a hard, irreducible purity to it. It might be bitter and despairing and pessimistic, but it could never be cynical. If music is tragic, those with asses' ears accuse it of being cynical. But when a composer is bitter, or in despair, or pessimistic, that still means he believes in something."
"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."
"What does the novel do? It tells beautiful, shapely lies which enclose hard, exact truths."
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