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"The final tormenting, unanswerable question: what is 'success' in mourning?"
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"Solitude is a wonderful treasure the world is still yet to discover."

"The question "who am I" is the first question that every person should ask himself."

"The time we are living in is a significant time."

"Every human being is a reflection of this universe."

"Find a place to think and a person to love and be happy."

"The purpose of our activities on earth must go beyond bread and butter or merely surviving."

"Take one minute every day and think hard about your life. You will always change for the best."

"Carefully analyze the old stories that you choose to perpetually tell, for these are really life-long meditations."

"If you don't want to regret your life later, then begin to invest your time, begin to measure your life. Measure your life by the products and by the results you produce!"

"One secret to wisdom: think more, speak less. If you let your words be few, your troubles will not be many."
Explore more quotes by Julian Barnes

"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."

"If you'll excuse a brief history lesson: most people didn't experience 'the sixties' until the seventies. Which meant, logically, that most people in the sixties were still experiencing the fifties--or, in my case, bits of both decades side by side. Which made things rather confusing."

"Does character develop over time? In novels, of course it does:otherwise there wouldn't be much of a story. But in life? I sometimes wonder. Our attitudes and opinions change we develop new habits and eccentricities; but that's something different, more like decoration. Perhaps character resembles intelligence, except that the character peaks a little later;between twenty and thirty, say. And after that we're just stuck with what we've got. We're on our own. If so, that would explain a lot of lives, wouldn't it? And also if this isn't too grand a word--our tragedy."

"If a memory wasn't a thing but a memory of a memory of a memory, mirrors set in parallel, then what the brain told you now about what it claimed had happened then would be coloured by what had happened in between. It was like a country remembering its history: the past was never just the past, it was what made the present able to live with itself."

"Flaubert didn't just hate the railway as such; he hated the way it flattered people with the illusion of progress. What was the point of scientific advance without moral advance? The railway would merely permit more people to move about, meet and be stupid together."

"The writer has little control over personal temperament, none over historical moment, and is only partly in charge of his or her own aesthetic."
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