Top 400 Julian Barnes Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 6 of 9

251. “Every day is Sunday” – that wouldn’t make a bad epitaph, would it?”

— Julian Barnes

252. “The diary was evidence; it was – it might be – corroboration. It might disrupt the banal reiterations of memory. It might jump-start something – though I had no idea what.”

— Julian Barnes

253. “People in love, it is well known, suffer extreme conceptual delusions, the most common of these being that other people find your condition as thrilling and eye-watering as you do yourselves.”

— Julian Barnes

254. “Perhaps love could never be captured in a definition; it could only ever be captured in a story.”

— Julian Barnes

255. “Medicine then must have been such an exciting, desperate, violent business; nowadays it is all pills and bureaucracy.”

— Julian Barnes

256. “I’m a complete democrat in terms of who buys my books.”

— Julian Barnes

257. “The more so because, among its repetitions, it is always looking for new ways to prick you.”

— Julian Barnes

258. “The ability to see and examine himself; the ability to make moral decisions and act on them; the mental and physical courage of his suicide. “He took his own life” is the phrase; but Adrian also took charge of his own life, he took command of it, he took it in his hands – and then out of them. How few of us – we that remain – can say that we have done the same? We muddle along, we let life happen to us, we gradually build up a store of memories.”

— Julian Barnes

259. “I remember what Old Joe Hun said when arguing with Adrian: that mental states can be inferred from actions. That’s in history – Henry VIII and all that. Whereas in the private life, I think the converse is true: that you can infer past actions from current mental states.”

— Julian Barnes

260. “The law, and society, and religion all said it was impossible to be sane, healthy, and kill yourself.”

— Julian Barnes

261. “Perhaps grief, which destroys all patterns, destroys even more: the belief that any patterns exist. But we cannot, I think, survive without such belief. So each of us must pretend to find, or re-erect, a pattern.”

— Julian Barnes

262. “Who can control how much they love? If you can control it, then it isn’t love. I don’t know what you call it instead, but it isn’t love.”

— Julian Barnes

263. “Cheer up! Death is round the corner.”

— Julian Barnes

264. “Opera cuts to the chase – as death does. An art which seeks, more obviously than any other form, to break your heart.”

— Julian Barnes

265. “And I thought of a cresting wave of water, lit by a moon, rushing past and vanishing upstream, pursued by a band of yelping students whose torchbeams criss-crossed in the dark. There is accumulation. There is responsibility. And beyond these, there is unrest. There is great unrest.”

— Julian Barnes

266. “The one thing that is very good in life today is death.”

— Julian Barnes

267. “To be Russian was to be pessimistic; to be Soviet was to be optimistic.”

— Julian Barnes

268. “Is any novelist going to recognize the moment when he or she has nothing more to say? It is a brave thing to admit. And since as a professional writer you are full of anxiety anyway, you could easily misread the signs.”

— Julian Barnes

269. “But that’s one advantage of fiction, you can speed up time.”

— Julian Barnes

270. “Perhaps this was one of the tragedies life plots for us: it is our destiny to become in old age what in youth we would have most despised.”

— Julian Barnes

271. “I think there’s a different authenticity to memory, and not an inferior one. Memory sorts and sifts according to the demands made on it by the rememberer.”

— Julian Barnes

272. “Altitude reduces all things to their relative proportions, and to the truth. Cares, remorse, disgust become strangers: How easily indifference, contempt, forgetfulness drop away... and forgiveness descends.”

— Julian Barnes

273. “But he was a connoisseur of the if-only, and so they did travel. They travelled in the past-conditional.”

— Julian Barnes

274. “Ah, the rheumy-eyed grandpa on the terraces inducting the lad into the mysteries of soccer: how to loathe people wearing different coloured shirts, how to feign injury, how to blow your snot onto the pitch – See, son, you press hard on one nostril to close it, and explode the green stuff out of the other. How to be vain and overpaid and have your best years behind you before you’ve even understood what life’s about. Oh yes, I look forward to taking Lucas to the football. But.”

— Julian Barnes

275. “So now, contended indifference before Middlesbrough against Slovan Bratislava coexisted with a craving for an art in which violent, overwhelming, hysterical and destructive emotion was the norm.”

— Julian Barnes

276. “They didn’t want you to fake adherence to their banal taste and meaningless critical slogans – they wanted you actually to believe in them.”

— Julian Barnes

277. “Posterity will jump to conclusions: that is its nature.”

— Julian Barnes

278. “Everything you invent is true: you can be sure of that. Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.”

— Julian Barnes

279. “Some Englishman once said that marriage is a long dull meal with the pudding served first.”

— Julian Barnes

280. “For Montaigne, the death of youth, which so often takes place unnoticed is the harder death; what we habitually refer to as ‘death’ is no more than the death of old age... The leap from the attenuated survival of senescence into nonexistence is much easier than the sly transition from heedless youth crabbed and regretful age.”

— Julian Barnes

281. “Film-makers and actors can only show a version of the act, but writers can express what people are thinking, feeling, as well as doing.”

— Julian Barnes

282. “But if you’re very clever, I think there’s something that can unhinge you if you’re not careful.”

— Julian Barnes

283. “It would be comforting if love were an energy source which continued to glow after our deaths.”

— Julian Barnes

284. “To die from ‘a draining away of one’s strength caused by extreme old age’ was in Montaigne’s day a ‘rare, singular and extraordinary death.’ Nowadays we assume it as our right.”

— Julian Barnes

285. “My philosopher friend, who gazed on life and decided that any responsible, thinking individual should have the right to reject this gift that had never been asked for – and whose noble gesture reemphasised with each passing decade the compromise and littleness that most lives consist of. ‘Most lives’: my life.”

— Julian Barnes

286. “Or perhaps it’s that same paradox again: the history that happens underneath our noses ought to be the clearest, and yet it’s the most deliquescent. We live in time, it bounds us and defines us, and time is supposed to measure history, isn’t it? But if we can’t understand time, can’t grasp its mysteries of pace and progress, what chance do we have with history – even our own small, personal, largely undocumented piece of it?”

— Julian Barnes

287. “It seemed... that intelligence wasn’t as pure and unalterable a characteristic as people believed. Being intelligent was like being good: you could be virtuous in one person’s company and yet wicked in another’s. You could be intelligent with one person and stupid with another. It was partly to do with confidence... In a way she had been more confident when she had been eighteen and foolish. At twenty-three, with Michael, she felt less confident and therefore less intelligent.”

— Julian Barnes

288. “I didn’t want the day to unravel. Though looking back, it was not the day, but the four of us, that were beginning to unravel.”

— Julian Barnes

289. “You realize how sympathy and antagonism can coexist. You are discovering how many seemingly incompatible emotions can thrive, side by side, in the same human heart.”

— Julian Barnes

290. “Sleep democratizes fear. The terror of a lost shoe or a missed train are as great here as those of guerrilla attack or nuclear war.”

— Julian Barnes

291. “Though always frank, the novelist was never wholly sincere.”

— Julian Barnes

292. “So, you see, we’re a played-out generation. All the best ones went. We were left with the lesser ones. It’s always like that in war. That’s why it’s up to your generation now.’ But I don’t feel part.”

— Julian Barnes

293. “Lovers are like Siamese twins, two bodies with a single soul; but if one dies before the other, the survivor has a corpse to lug around.”

— Julian Barnes

294. “Again, I must stress that this is my reading now of what happened then. Or rather, my memory now of my reading then of what was happening at the time.”

— Julian Barnes

295. “In truth, he was just another man, behaving as men did in books, and she was just another woman for believing otherwise.”

— Julian Barnes

296. “If asked in a court of law what happened and what was said, I could only attest to the words “heading,” “stagnating” and “peaceable.” I’d never thought of myself as peaceable – or its opposite – until then. I would also swear to the truth of the biscuit tin; it was burgundy red, with the Queen’s smiling profile on it.”

— Julian Barnes

297. “Truth to life, at the start, to be sure; yet once the process gets under way, truth to art is the greater allegiance.”

— Julian Barnes

298. “Yes it was, but as I said, it depended on where – and who – you were. 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.”

— Julian Barnes

299. “But art and religion will always shadow one another through the abstract nouns they both invoke: truth, seriousness, imagination, sympathy, morality, transcendence.”

— Julian Barnes

300. “The strong cannot help confronting; the less strong cannot help evading.”

— Julian Barnes