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"Irony - The modern mode: either the devil's mark or the snorkel of sanity."
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"Don't interrupt me while I'm interrupting."

"This was not of the nature of a Christlike lesson for Owen Meany to learn, as he lay in the manger, that someone you hate can give you a hard-on."

"Kemp: I demonstrated conclusively this morning that invisibility--I.M: Never mind what YOU'VE DEMONSTRATED!--I'm starving, said the voice, and the night is--chilly for a man without clothes."

"I hope you're not smoking in front of her,' Lucia says to him.'Yeah, I lie in bed and puff in her face, Lucia,' he says, irritated."

"Niagara ... is the first disappointment in the married life of many Americans who spend their honeymoon there."

"You humans, always eating. I'll make you soup. You can eat it while you keep working." Myrnin set aside his book and walked into the back of the lab."Don't use the same beaker you used for poisons!" Claire yelled after him. He waved a pale hand. "I mean it!"
Explore more quotes by Julian Barnes

"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."

"Perhaps this was one of the tragedies life plots for us: it is our destiny to become in old age what in youth we would have most despised."

"A pier is a disappointed bridge, yet stare at it for long enough and you can dream it to the other side of the Channel."

"Pride makes us long for a solution to things " a solution, a purpose, a final cause; but the better telescopes become, the more stars appear."

"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."

"Because just as all political and historical change sooner or later disappoints, so does adulthood. So does life. Sometimes I think the purpose of life is to reconcile us to its eventual loss by wearing us down, by proving, however long it takes, that life isn t all it s cracked up to be."

"To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness - though if stupidity is lacking, the others are useless."

"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."

"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."
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