top of page
.png){kind=small}
"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?"
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Observation quotes
"The bowl is warmer than the soup."
"While humans play God, dogs learn from their masters."
"His was an impenetrable darkness. I looked at him as you peer down at a man who is lying at the bottom of a precipice where the sun never shines."
"No writer has an imaginative power richer than what the streets offer."
"I've often been sorry to see a night end, even while I have loved seeing the dawn come."
"That was the sorrow of it. He saw the light but never expected the darkness."
"Dickens writes that one of his characters, "listened to everything without seeming to, which showed he understood his business."
"Boys are marvellous creatures. Perhaps they will sink below the brutes, perhaps they will attain to a woman's tenderness."
"If you love something so much let it go. If it comes back it was meant to be, if it doesn't it never was."
"In the distance, I can see a storm coming in, the dark clouds and the lightning on the horizon moving towards me. I wait and I wait and I wait for the storm. And then it comes, and the rains wash away the nightmares and the memories. And I'm not afraid."
Explore more quotes by Julian Barnes
"The better you know someone, the less well you often see them (and the less well they can therefore be transferred into fiction). They may be so close as to be out of focus, and there is no operating novelist to dispel the blur."
"WHORES.Necessary in the nineteenth century for the contraction of syphilis, without which no one could claim genius."
"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."
"The writer has little control over personal temperament, none over historical moment, and is only partly in charge of his or her own aesthetic."
"If you turned your back on irony, it curdled into sarcasm. And what good was it then? Sarcasm was irony which had lost its soul."
"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."
"Books say: she did this because. Life says: she did this. Books are where things are explained to you, life where things aren't."
"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