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"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."
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Exlpore more Perception quotes
"Materialistic perception of life makes us spiritually shortsighted."
"Beauty is only there when you have the ability to see and appreciate it."
"Close your eyes to see the world with your imaginative mind."
"Light wears out the eyes but does not wear out the soul."
"What other people think is important to them. What you think has great importance to you."
"Maya (deceit) means that one cannot see the nature of things as they are but sees them in a different form."
"We each project to others a reflection of the world which includes our choices of perception."
"If your life is founded on what you can see then your success will be insignificant and very brief."
"We do not actually know other nations, we only know our judgements."
"The essential Not-self could be perceived very clearly in things and in livingcreatures on the hither side of good and evil. In human beings it was visible only when they were inrepose, their minds untroubled, their bodies motionless."
Explore more quotes by Julian Barnes
"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."
"To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness - though if stupidity is lacking, the others are useless."
"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."
"If you'll excuse a brief history lesson: most people didn't experience 'the sixties' until the seventies. Which meant, logically, that most people in the sixties were still experiencing the fifties--or, in my case, bits of both decades side by side. Which made things rather confusing."
"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."
"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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