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"It had been a slow and painful business, discovering that the theory of love did not match the reality of life. It was like expecting to be able to write a symphony because you had once read a handbook of composition."
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"I can't leave her now. I like her too much. There, I said it. But I won't say it again."
"You all right?" he said again.I didn't love him, I was far away from him, it was as though I was seeing him through a smeared window or glossy paper; he didn't belong here. But he existed, he deserved to be alive. I was wishing I could tell him how to change so he could get there, the place where I was."Yes," I said. I touched him on the arm with my hand. My hand touched his arm. Hand touched arm. Language divides us into fragments, I wanted to be whole."
"I shivered as the cold was all encompassing, not just from being outdoors, but from being read as well. He had a way of seeing through me. It was as unnerving as it was bonding and I couldn't figure out how the two could co-exist."
"One's first love is the most transformative and least replicable experience. I could love someone else, but it would be its own unfathomable emotion. It would not be this precious, first, spring love. If I cannot love her fully, it will be a love that corrodes within me."
"However, he wrote some verses on her, and very pretty they were. "And so ended his affection," said Elizabeth impatiently. "There has been many a one, I fancy, overcome in the same way. I wonder who first discovered the efficacy of poetry in driving away love! "I have been used to consider poetry as the food of love," said Darcy. "Of a fine, stout, healthy love it may. Everything nourishes what is strong already. But if it be only a slight, thin sort of inclination, I am convinced that one good sonnet will starve it entirely away."
"You're mine, he growled. He hoped she really understood that too. That she was his in every sense of the word. And vice versa. The female completely owned him. Until the day he died, he would be hers."
"She wanted to know what it was like to be completely possessed by this man. Instead of scaring her, the thought sent the most erotic thrill racing through her. If she was stupid enough to sleep with him, she knew that things between them would end badly, but she wanted Levi in a way that defied logic, and probably her sanity, and she wanted everything he had to offer. Even if she got burned in the end."
Explore more quotes by Julian Barnes
"If you remember your past too well you start blaming your present for it. Look what they did to me, that's what caused me to be like this, it's not my fault. Permit me to correct you: it probably is your fault. And kindly spare me the details."
"He didn't really like travel, of course. He liked the idea of travel, and the memory of travel, but not travel itself."
"What could be put up against the noise of time? Only that music which is inside ourselves - the music of our being - which is transformed by some into real music. Which, over the decades, if it is string and true and pure enough to drown out the noise of time, is transformed into the whisper of history."
"Time...give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical."
"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?"
"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."
"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."
"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."
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