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"When I was still quite young I had a complete presentiment of life. It was like the nauseating smell of cooking escaping from a ventilator: you don't have to have eaten it to know that it would make you throw up."
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"Oh, to awake from dreaming!"

"Seeing her sitting there unresponsive makes me realize that silence has a sound."

"I will never tell another person, "I don't understand you... and why? Because if I say that, it means that I am disabled in a way. The inability to connect to another's perspective is, I believe, a disability."

"To cleave wood is a common every-day business, and yet it has its dangers; so then, reader, there are dangers connected with your calling and daily life which it will be well for you to be aware of. Your occupation may be as humble as log splitting, and yet the devil can tempt you in it. Nowhere is he safe who thinks himself so."

"At a Chamber of Commerce networking breakfast, two of my friends and I were standing in a circle talking. A stranger approached, interrupted our little reunion, and gave each of us her card. She then began talking about herself and her business without a hint of social awareness, or care about her interruption. She even had the tactless gall to ask us for referrals. When she left our small circle, we looked at each other and laughed, "What was that?"

"If you think everybody hates you, then your ignorance is beyond the limit, because there's a loving heart somewhere longing to see your face."

"Shattered edges of the diamonds rough sets to cut the unsuspecting."

"Vigilance of the wisest kind is to incessantly remain open to the reality that what I 'see' is but a single thread and solitary shard of what 'is', for to assume otherwise is to surrender the wisdom of vigilance to the decay of ignorance."
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."

"History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation."

"Throw off your grief,' doubters imply, 'and we can all go back to pretending death doesn't exist, or at least is comfortably far away."

"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."

"I thought of the things that had happened to me over the years, and of how little I had made happen."
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