top of page
.png){kind=small}
"In my terms, I settled for the realities of life, and submitted to its necessities: if this, then that, and so the years passed. In Adrian's terms, I gave up on life, gave up on examining it, took it as it came. And so, for the first time, I began to feel a more general remorse - a feeling somewhere between self-pity and self-hatred - about my whole life. All of it. I had lost the friends of my youth. I had lost the love of my wife. I had abandoned the ambitions I had entertained. I had wanted life not to bother me too much, and had succeeded - and how pitiful that was."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Reflection quotes
"When you leave a port, ask yourself two questions: What mark you have made on that port and what have you learned from that port?"
"The laws is not meant to destroy us. But our disobedience leads to our own destruction."
"Whether you are aware of it or not, your life is still disappearing. It's pouring out, it keeps diminishing."
"You never know what people have endured to get where they are."
"Why do you compare yourself to others? Can you carry weight of others on your shoulders?"
"Everyone should think about why certain undesirable situations occur in life."
"Knowing my soul is my lifetime-study."
"What you are seeking is yourself."
"Life is head and shoulders above all other things we regard as precious in this world."
"The world is full of vanities."
Explore more quotes by Julian Barnes
"What does the novel do? It tells beautiful, shapely lies which enclose hard, exact truths."
"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."
"Women scheme when they are weak, they lie out of fear. Men scheme when they are strong, they lie out of arrogance."
"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."
"His air of failure had nothing desperate about it; rather, it seemed to stem from an unresented realisation that he was not cut out for success, and his duty was therefore to ensure only that he failed in the correct and acceptable fashion."
"When you're young you prefer the vulgar months, the fullness of the seasons. As you grow older you learn to like the in-between times, the months that can't make up their minds. Perhaps it's a way of admitting that things can't ever bear the same certainty again."
"The imagination doesn't crop annually like a reliable fruit tree. The writer has to gather whatever's there: sometimes too much, sometimes too little, sometimes nothing at all. And in the years of glut there is always a slatted wooden tray in some cool, dark attic, which the writer nervously visits from time to time; and yes, oh dear, while he's been hard at work downstairs, up in the attic there are puckering skins, warning spots, a sudden brown collapse and the sprouting of snowflakes. What can he do about it?"
"You can define a net two ways, depending on your point of view. Normally you would say it is a meshed instrument designed to catch fish. But you could, with no great injury to logic, reverse the image and define the net as a jocular lexicographer once did: he called it a collection of holes tied together with string."
"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."
bottom of page