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"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."
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"Thought, if I may put it, is the man behind the possession, appearance, things we like, things we hate and the very epitome of life."
"Your subconscious mind is the universal mind with a universal consciousness."
"Absolute is infinite so there is no absolute truth. There is truth that you can see in infinite ways and make your own."
"Every aspect of your life will be enlivened when you start to think and communicate with your heart and mind in cohesive coordinated harmony."
"Think about yourself because no one has time to think about you. Everyone is busy thinking about themselves."
"I don't claim to know everything, Wally. I only claim that everything can eventually be known."
"I don't know who you are or where you are, but I know your deep driving desires. I am writing to you to make your life a little easier and better."
"There are two kinds of people:those who learned to love and those who didn't."
"Any education that doesn't allow you to think freely is not an education but a prison."
"I came to this world to bloom and spread my love to fill the world with happiness."
Explore more quotes by Julian Barnes
"Women scheme when they are weak, they lie out of fear. Men scheme when they are strong, they lie out of arrogance."
"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."
"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."
"We live with such easy assumptions, don't we? For instance, that memory equals events plus time. But it's all much odder than this. Who was it said that memory is what we thought we'd forgotten? And it ought to be obvious to us that time doesn't act as a fixative, rather as a solvent. But it's not convenient--- it's not useful--- to believe this; it doesn't help us get on with our lives; so we ignore it."
"Love may not lead where we think or hope, but regardless of outcome it should be a call to seriousness and truth. If it is not that - if it is not moral in its effect - then love is no more than an exaggerated form of pleasure."
"He didn't really like travel, of course. He liked the idea of travel, and the memory of travel, but not travel itself."
"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."
"He thought of trying to explain something he had recently noticed about himself: that if anyone insulted him, or one of his friends, he didn't really mind--or not much, anyway. Whereas if anyone insulted a novel, a story, a poem that he loved, something visceral and volcanic occurred within him. He wasn't sure what this might mean--except perhaps that he had got life and art mixed up, back to front, upside down."
"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."
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