Top 60 Anita Brookner Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Existentialism is about being a saint without God; being your own hero, without all the sanction and support of religion or society.”

— Anita Brookner

2. “For once a thing is known, it can never be unknown. It can only be forgotten.”

— Anita Brookner

3. “Real love is a pilgrimage. It happens when there is no strategy, but it is very rare because most people are strategists.”

— Anita Brookner

4. “There are moments when you feel free, moments when you have energy, moments when you have hope, but you can’t rely on any of these things to see you through. Circumstances do that.”

— Anita Brookner

5. “Death is only a small interruption.”

— Anita Brookner

6. “Time misspent in youth is sometimes all the freedom one ever has.”

— Anita Brookner

7. “My idea of absolute happiness is to sit in a hot garden all day, reading, or writing, utterly safe in the knowledge that the person I love will come home to me in the evening. Every evening.”

— Anita Brookner

8. “A man can go from being a lover to being a stranger in three moves flat but a woman under the guise of friendship will engage in acts of duplicity which come to light very much later. There are different species of self-justification.”

— Anita Brookner

9. “Satire is dependent on strong beliefs, and on strong beliefs wounded.”

— Anita Brookner

Featured in: Strong Quotes

10. “Romanticism is not just a mode; it literally eats into every life. Women will never get rid of just waiting for the right man.”

— Anita Brookner

Featured in: Romance Quotes

11. “You never know what you will learn till you start writing. Then you discover truths you never knew existed.”

— Anita Brookner

12. “All good fortune is a gift of the gods, and you don’t win the favor of the ancient gods by being good, but by being bold.”

— Anita Brookner

13. “Dr Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature.”

— Anita Brookner

14. “Good women always think it is their fault when someone else is being offensive. Bad women never take the blame for anything.”

— Anita Brookner

15. “They had waited for too long, and the result was this hiatus, and the reflection that time and patience may bring poor rewards, that time itself, if not confronted at the appropriate juncture, can play sly tricks, and more significantly, that those who do not act are not infrequently acted upon.”

— Anita Brookner

16. “It is always later than you think.”

— Anita Brookner

17. “I need noise and interruptions and irritation: irritation and discomfort are a great starter. The loneliness of doing it any other way would kill me.”

— Anita Brookner

18. “Problems of human behavior still continue to baffle us, but at least in the Library we have them properly filed.”

— Anita Brookner

19. “The self-fulfilled woman is far from reality.”

— Anita Brookner

20. “You can never betray the people who are dead, so you go on being a public Jew; the dead can’t answer slurs, but I’m here. I would love to think that Jesus wants me for a sunbeam, but he doesn’t.”

— Anita Brookner

21. “That sun, that light had faded, and she had faded with them. Now she was as grey as the season itself.”

— Anita Brookner

22. “I suppose what one wants really is ideal company and books are ideal company.”

— Anita Brookner

Featured in: Reading Quotes

23. “And without understanding, could each properly love the other?”

— Anita Brookner

24. “Not everyone is born to fulfill an heroic role. The only realistic ambition is to live in the present. And sometimes, quite often in fact, this is more than enough to keep one busy. Time, which was once squandered, must now be given over to the actual, the possible, and perhaps that evanescent hope of a good outcome which never deserts one, and which should never be abandoned.”

— Anita Brookner

25. “Life is a pilgrimage and if you don’t play by the rules you don’t find the Road to Damascus, you find the Crown of Thorns.”

— Anita Brookner

26. “The lessons taught in great books are misleading. The commerce in life is rarely so simple and never so just.”

— Anita Brookner

27. “Always let them think of you as singing and dancing.”

— Anita Brookner

28. “When you make a break for freedom you don’t necessarily find company on the way.”

— Anita Brookner

29. “It is best to marry for purely selfish reasons.”

— Anita Brookner

30. “To remain pure, a novel has to cast a moral puzzle. Anything else is mere negotiation.”

— Anita Brookner

31. “You have no idea how promising the world begins to look once you have decided to have it all for yourself. And how much healthier your decisions are once they become entirely selfish.”

— Anita Brookner

32. “I was brought up among the sort of self-important women who had a husband as one has an alibi.”

— Anita Brookner

33. “Fiction is the great repository of the moral sense. The wicked get punished.”

— Anita Brookner

34. “Writing has freed me from the despair of living.”

— Anita Brookner

35. “We were both dutiful, of course, my mother because she was a dutiful woman: I myself felt less humble but knew that life was only simple when one concurred with the wishes of others. In itself this is a dangerous weakness, but it seemed obligatory at the time.”

— Anita Brookner

36. “The trouble with good manners is that people are persuaded that you are all right, require no protection, are perfectly capable of looking after yourself.”

— Anita Brookner

37. “The evening passes somehow; I watch television with Nancy, or I write. It is difficult, not having a family, and it is difficult to explain. I always go to bed early. And I am always ready for Monday morning, that time that other people dread.”

— Anita Brookner

38. “And I go to bed too early. I sometimes think I should never have married because I need too much sleep.”

— Anita Brookner

39. “I am 46, and have been for some time past.”

— Anita Brookner

40. “It will be a pity if women in the more conventional mould are to be phased out, for there will never be anyone to go home to.”

— Anita Brookner

41. “I think that those few words were my greatest mistake.”

— Anita Brookner

42. “Great writers are the saints for the godless.”

— Anita Brookner

43. “You get a lot of borderline cases in libraries.”

— Anita Brookner

44. “Parents are only good as parents at a certain stage of their children’s lives, she reflected.”

— Anita Brookner

45. “One loses the capacity to grieve as a child grieves, or to rage as a child rages: hotly, despairingly, with tears of passion. One grows up, one becomes civilized, one learns one’s manners, and consequently can no longer manage these two functions – sorrow and anger – adequately.”

— Anita Brookner

46. “You can never betray the people who are dead.”

— Anita Brookner

47. “Had she been more active, less reclusive, she would have gone out into the streets to lose herself in some sort of company, have made the pretext of buying an evening paper an opportunity to chat to the newsagent, but she rejected such stratagems, seeing them for what they were. It had been decreed that she was to be solitary, and somehow she had always known this. Once she had left her parents’ house all friendships had seemed provisional; even marriage had not changed that.”

— Anita Brookner

48. “Boundaries keep people out; mine served only to keep me in.”

— Anita Brookner

49. “You have no idea how promising the world begins to looks once you have decided to have it all for yourself. And how much healthier your decisions are once they become entirely selfish. It is the simplest thing in the world to decide what you want to do – or, rather, what you don’t want to do – and just to act on that.”

— Anita Brookner

50. “She was not aware of loneliness so much as of endeavour: her future career as a writer, of which there was as yet no sign, would, she thought, in time validate her entire existence. Until then she would adopt – had already adopted – a regime which would steel her against rejection and disappointment.”

— Anita Brookner