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"One of the things he had learned in life, and which he hoped he could rely on, was that a greater pain drives out a lesser one. A strained muscle disappears before toothache, toothache disappears before a crushed finger. He hoped - it was his only hope now - that the pain of cancer, the pain of dying , would drive out the pains of love. It did not seem likely."
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Exlpore more Resilience quotes
"I had to break to pieces, so I could reassemble even stronger."
"Comport yourself with grace under pressure."
"Even the smartest and most successful of people will experience lower self-confidence occasionally, but the difference is that they deliberately shift out of it and refuse to stay there."
"It's not my story anymore: whenever I speak about the past now, I feel as if I were talking about something that has nothing to do with me. All that remains in the present are the voice, the presence, and the importance of fulfilling my mission. I don't regret difficulties I experienced; I think they helped me to become the person I am today, I feel the way a warrior must feel after years of training; he doesn't remember the details of everything he learned, but he knows how to strike when the time is right."
"As my sufferings mounted I soon realized that there were two ways in which I could respond to my situation -- either to react with bitterness or seek to transform the suffering into a creative force. I decided to follow the latter course."
"If you can't forget about all the great pains you've endured, as many of us can't, at least take some time to celebrate the fact that you've somehow kept going, in spite of it all. And you've certainly kept growing, because of it all."
"What cannot be altered must be borne not blamed."
"People give up. People settle. People persevere. And you can do all three if you're smart enough."
"You are a failure not the time when you are defeated.. but when you give up fighting."
"I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all extraneous delights should be withheld, or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give."
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."
"Women scheme when they are weak, they lie out of fear. Men scheme when they are strong, they lie out of arrogance."
"The greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonorably, foolishly, viciously."
"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."
"Remember the botched brothel-visit in L'Education sentimentale and remember its lesson. Do not participate: happiness lies in the imagination, not the act. Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory."
"History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation."
"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."
"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."
"I blushed. You haven't seen a bald man in his sixties blush? Oh, it happens, just as it does to a hairy, spotty fifteen-year-old. And because it's rarer, it sends the blusher tumbling back to that time when life felt like nothing more than one long sequence of embarrassments."
"Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time. Art does not exist for art's sake: it exists for people's sake."
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