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"Most people, in my opinion, steal much of what they are. If they didn't what poor items they would be."
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"The common behavior of mankind is the system of reference by means of which we interpret an unknown language."
"Most of the men had simple souls. They could relate facts, but they said very little about what they dimly felt."
"A physician is not angry at the intemperance of a mad patient, nor does he take it ill to be railed at by a man in fever. Just so should a wise man treat all mankind, as a physician does his patient, and look upon them only as sick and extravagant."
"We are, or rather our natural desire to evade pain and to attain pleasure is, the primary reason we do or say every single thing we do or say."
"I waited. Women talk when they want to. Or don't."
"Acceptable hypocrisy is often called politeness."
"Often a woman that doesn't have any business being in a fight is there because their ego thinks it can mend what other people can't. It's either superiority or a second chance to heal a wound they have, by meddling on your battlefield."
"No man is exempt from saying silly things, the mischief is to say them deliberately."
"Cruel people offer pity when they no longer feel threatened. However, kind people offer compassion and understanding regardless."
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."
"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."
"In those days, we imagined ourselves as being kept in some kind of holding pen, waiting to be released into our lives. And when the moment came, our lives -- and time itself -- would speed up. How were we to know that our lives had in any case begun, that some advantage had already been gained, some damage already inflicted? Also, that our release would only be into a larger holding pen, whose boundaries would be at first undiscernible."
"You get towards the end of life - no, not life itself, but of something else: the end of any likelihood of change in that life. You are allowed a long moment of pause, time enough to ask the question: what else have I done wrong?"
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