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"Love is just a system for getting someone to call you Darling after sex."
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"Surely the Cupid serving him was lefthanded, with a weak chin and no imagination."
"You don't love someone because they're perfect, you love them in spite of the fact that they're not."
"I put my forehead on his collarbone, place one hand on his chest. Its rhythm reassures me: He is real, and he is now."
"Take it from me: love has all the lasting permanence of a rainbow-beautiful while it's there, and just as likely to have disappeared by the time you blink."
"Love [is] supposed to move mountains, to make the world go round, to be all you need, but it [falls] apart at the deatils. It [can't] save a single person."
"She was right about something else too," Dimitri said after a long pause. My back was to him, but there was a strange quality to his voice that made me turn around."What's that?" I asked."That I do still love you."With that one sentence, everything in the universe changed."
"I want someone to sit beside after the day's pursuit and all its anguish, after its listening, and its waitings, and its suspicions. After quarrelling and reconciliation I need privacy - to be alone with you, to set this hubbub in order. For I am as neat as a cat in my habits."
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."
"Women scheme when they are weak, they lie out of fear. Men scheme when they are strong, they lie out of arrogance."
"One of the things he had learned in life, and which he hoped he could rely on, was that a greater pain drives out a lesser one. A strained muscle disappears before toothache, toothache disappears before a crushed finger. He hoped - it was his only hope now - that the pain of cancer, the pain of dying , would drive out the pains of love. It did not seem likely."
"The greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonorably, foolishly, viciously."
"Flaubert didn't just hate the railway as such; he hated the way it flattered people with the illusion of progress. What was the point of scientific advance without moral advance? The railway would merely permit more people to move about, meet and be stupid together."
"I am more optimistic, both about reading and about books. There will always be non-readers, bad readers, lazy readers " there always were. Reading is a majority skill but a minority art. Yet nothing can replace the exact, complicated, subtle communion between absent author and entranced, present reader."
"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."
"History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation."
"Does character develop over time? In novels, of course it does:otherwise there wouldn't be much of a story. But in life? I sometimes wonder. Our attitudes and opinions change we develop new habits and eccentricities; but that's something different, more like decoration. Perhaps character resembles intelligence, except that the character peaks a little later;between twenty and thirty, say. And after that we're just stuck with what we've got. We're on our own. If so, that would explain a lot of lives, wouldn't it? And also if this isn't too grand a word--our tragedy."
"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."
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