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"When we're young, everyone over the age of thirty looks middle-aged, everyone over fifty antique. And time, as it goes by, confirms that we weren't that wrong. Those little age differentials, so crucial and so gross when we are young erode. We end up all belonging to the same category, that of the non-young. I've never much minded this myself."
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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

"When life gives you pain, give life your unconditional love."

"You, your thoughts, and your imagination control the doorway to happiness. Service to the humanity is key to that doorway."
Explore more quotes by Julian Barnes

"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."

"He didn't really like travel, of course. He liked the idea of travel, and the memory of travel, but not travel itself."

"What could be put up against the noise of time? Only that music which is inside ourselves - the music of our being - which is transformed by some into real music. Which, over the decades, if it is string and true and pure enough to drown out the noise of time, is transformed into the whisper of history."

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

"How weird it would be to have around you only as many books as you have time to read in the rest of your life. And I remain deeply attached to the physical book and the physical bookshop."

"I feel sorry for novelists when they have to mention women's eyes: there's so little choice, and whatever colouring is decided upon inevitably carries banal implications. Her eyes are blue: innocence and honesty. Her eyes are black: passion and depth. Her eyes are green: wildness and jealousy. Her eyes are violet: the novel is by Raymond Chandler."

"WHORES.Necessary in the nineteenth century for the contraction of syphilis, without which no one could claim genius."

"Back then, things were plainer: less money, no electronic devices, little fashion tyranny, no girlfriends. There was nothing to distract us from our human and filial duty which was to study, pass exams, use those qualifications to find a job, and then put together a way of life unthreateningly fuller than that of our parents, who would approve, while privately comparing it to their own earlier lives, which had been simpler, and therefore superior."
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