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"The land of embarrassment and breakfast."
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"It takes all sorts of people to make a world, as I've often heard, but I think there are some who could be spared,' Anne told her reflection in the east gable mirror that night."
"Show me a man or a woman alone and I'll show you a saint. Give me two and they'll fall in love. Give me three and they'll invent the charming thing we call 'society'. Give me four and they'll build a pyramid. Give me five and they'll make one an outcast. Give me six and they'll reinvent prejudice. Give me seven and in seven years they'll reinvent warfare. Man may have been made in the image of God, but human society was made in the image of His opposite number, and is always trying to get back home."
"Your water is in the bottles, and my water is in the bucket, but we are brothers? I am collecting garbage, and you are in the bed, but we are sisters? My fingers are broken, and your hands are so soft, but we are family? Your God is like an angel, and my God is like an evil, but we are equal? My stomach is empty, and your stomach is so big, but we are humans?"
"PLEASE and THANK YOU...two polite phrases which are slowly disappearing from our vocabulary."
"We...advance toward a state of society in which not only each man but every impulse in each man claims carte blanche."
"People are very busy; they are so busy that when they walk in the crowds they see no one, no one but themselves; they hear no voice, no voice but their own voice!"
Explore more quotes by Julian Barnes
"Books say: she did this because. Life says: she did this. Books are where things are explained to you, life where things aren't."
"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."
"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?"
"I am more optimistic, both about reading and about books. There will always be non-readers, bad readers, lazy readers " there always were. Reading is a majority skill but a minority art. Yet nothing can replace the exact, complicated, subtle communion between absent author and entranced, present reader."
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