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"Our parents thought we might be corrupted by one another into becoming whatever it was they most feared: an incorrigible masturbator, a winsome homosexual, a recklessly impregnatory libertine. On our behalf they dreaded the closeness of adolescent friendship, the predatory behaviour of strangers on trains, the lure of the wrong kind of girl. How far their anxieties outran our experience."
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Exlpore more Parenting quotes
"Being a parent wasn't just about bearing a child. It was about bearing witness to its life."
"Disciplining a child is easier than disciplining a grown person, and forgiving a child's insolence is easier than forgiving a grown person's impudence."
"Don't box your children in and tell them that everything is a sin. You'll produce either rebels, or very boring people."
"Effective parenting requires being the grown up version of what you want your children to be. Why? Because example is the most compelling superpower."
"Your love life is insignificant when it comes to raising your children to be respectable human beings. The moment you see them suffer or lower their standards because of your selfishness, is the day you should realize that nothing matters more than them. You are not just the queen or king of your fairy tale. The real story of your life is the gift of time God gave you with them."
"Passing their toilet training is the very last thing that some adults did that has made their parents proud of them."
"Mothers should be very careful what type of boys and men they create, or allow to be created."
Explore more quotes by Julian Barnes
"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."
"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?"
"Life versus Death becomes, as Montaigne pointed out, Old Age versus Death."
"Is there anything more plausible than a second hand?"
"History isn't what happened, history is just what historians tell us."
"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."
"What does the novel do? It tells beautiful, shapely lies which enclose hard, exact truths."
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