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"He feared me as many men fear women: because their mistresses (or their wives) understand them. They are scarcely adult, some men: they wish women to understand them, and to that end they tell them all their secrets; and then, when they are properly understood, they hate their women for understanding them."
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"My heart broke and my mind opened, tragedy works in a funny way like that ~ what once tore me apart was actually what was setting my truth free."

"Day or night, good or bad, all things from within."

"People who are two faced, usually forget which mask they are wearing at some point in their life."

"We are who we are because of what we learn and what we remember."

"If we let the drama of others' lives become our own, then we are no longer ourselves. We become the reflections of others' dramas and their lives, their tragedies, and their misfortunes become our own."

"I've always felt that the best whips and chains are in the mind. With a little creativity, the physical ones are hardly necessary."

"Our conscious self is what we admit to being. Our unconscious shadow is the part of us that we attempt to suppress, the part of us that our family, friends, employers, coworkers, associates, clients, neighbors, and society tells us to discard. Our shadow emerges from the unspeakable things that we discover about the world and ourselves. Both the magnificent as well as the bizarre residue of prior experiences lies buried and unconfessed in the fissures of our unconscious mind. The less a person's shadow is embodied in a person's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is."

"I don't need psychologyI am not a sociopathNeither and Psychopath."

"Do not focus on your failings, for you will only encourage them. If you keep beating yourself up on the head over these, you will only reinforce them."
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."

"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."

"How do we seize the past? Can we ever do so? When I was a medical student some pranksters at the end-of-the-term dance released into the hall a piglet which had been smeared with grease. It squirmed between legs, evaded capture, squealed a lot. People fell over trying to grasp it, and were made to look ridiculous in the process. The past often seems to behave like that piglet."

"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."

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

"Love may not lead where we think or hope, but regardless of outcome it should be a call to seriousness and truth. If it is not that - if it is not moral in its effect - then love is no more than an exaggerated form of pleasure."

"Was it the case that colours dimmed as the eye grew elderly? Or was it rather that in youth your excitement about the world transferred itself onto everything you saw and made it brighter?"
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