Create Yours

Top 400 Julian Barnes Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 7 of 9

Julian Barnes Quote: “The answers hardly seemed of consequence. Not much did. I thought of the things that had happened to me over the years, and of how little I had made happen.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “Be approximately satisfied with approximate happiness. The only thing in life which is clear and beyond doubt is unhappiness.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “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 Quote: “My reading might be pointless in terms of the history of literary criticism; but it’s not pointless in terms of pleasure.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “But art and religion will always shadow one another through the abstract nouns they both invoke: truth, seriousness, imagination, sympathy, morality, transcendence.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “The strong cannot help confronting; the less strong cannot help evading.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “The trouble was, how could you know what question to ask? It seemed to her that you were in a position to ask a really correct question only if you already knew the answer, and what was the point of that?”
Julian Barnes Quote: “And so, by the end, you have tried soft love and tough love, feelings and reason, truth and lies, promises and threats, hope and stoicism.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “And since the griefstruck rarely know what they need or want, only what they don’t, offence-giving and offence-taking are common.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “I know this much: that there is objective time, but also subjective time, the kind you wear on the inside of your wrist, next to where the pulse lies. And this personal time, which is the true time, is measured in your relationship to memory. So when this strange thing happened – when these new memories suddenly came upon me – it was as if, for that moment, time had been placed in reverse. As if, for that moment, the river ran upstream.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “Tragedies in hindsight look like farces.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “You realize that you want official interference into other people’s lives but not into your own. You also realize that your truthfulness has become dangerously flexible.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “An English silence – one in which all the unspoken words are perfectly understood by both parties – prevailed. I got into my bed and wept. The matter was never referred to again.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “Truths about writing can be framed before you’ve published a word; truths about life can be framed only when it’s too late to make any difference.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “Why does anything left-wing have to be trendy before it’s read, and by the time it’s trendy it’s already a force for conservatism?”
Julian Barnes Quote: “One of my sons writes books I can read, but cannot understand, and the other writes books I can understand, but cannot read.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “At times, I suspect that the concept of maturity is maintained by a conspiracy of niceness.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “Had he been naive, or overambitious? Both, probably. In life, you might be a bohemian and an adventurer, but you also sought a pattern, an arrangement to help you through, even if – even as – you kicked against it.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “The emphasis is on the lost, the abandoned, the discarded sinners, God’s detritus.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “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.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “Still, I’m not curious enough to find out. At this stage I prefer not to know.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “The self-doubt of the young is nothing compared to the self-doubt of the old. And this, perhaps, was their final triumph over him. Instead of killing him, they had allowed him to live, and by allowing him to live, they had killed him. This was the final, unanswerable irony to his life: that by allowing him to live, they had killed him.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “One small revenge might be to die and show no signs of having died.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “Because once you had been through certain things, their presence inside you never really disappeared.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “The way, the truth and the life. You go on your way through life telling the truth.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “The relationship between professional and domestic cook has similarities to a sexual encounter. One party is normally more experienced than the other; and either party should have the right, at any moment, to say, “No, I’m not going to do that.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “He had entered some state of grace – but one that did not exclude. He made you feel you were his co-thinker, even if you said nothing.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “Beware of dreams,” Elizabeth Finch replied. “Also, as a general rule, beware of what most people aspire to.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “I thought of writing books myself once. I had the ideas; I even made notes. But I was a doctor, married with children. You can only do one thing well: Flaubert knew that.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “Insofar as I liked doing things by myself, it was partly for the pleasure of telling her about them afterwards.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “There is a grotesquerie to grief as well. You lose the sense of your existence being rational, or justifiable. You feel absurd.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “Try as I could – which wasn’t very hard – I rarely ended up fantasising a markedly different life from the one that has been mine. I don’t think this is complacency; it’s more likely a lack of imagination, or ambition, or something.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “We could not be further from ballooning’s established tropes: freedom, spiritual exaltation, human progress. Redon’s eternally open eye is deeply unsettling. The eye in the sky; God’s security camera. And that lumpish human head invites us to conclude that the colonisation of space doesn’t purify the colonisers; all that has happened is that we have brought our sinfulness to a new location.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “El arte siempre tiene al tiempo de su parte.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “Masters and parents used to remind us irritatingly that they too had once been young, and so could speak with authority. It’s just a phase, they would insist. You’ll grow out of it; life will teach you reality and realism. But back then we declined to acknowledge that they had ever been anything like us, and we knew that we grasped life – and truth, and morality, and art – far more clearly than our compromised elders.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “My brother distrusts the essential truth of memories; I distrust the way we colour them in. We each have our own cheap-mail-order paintbox, and our favourite hues. Thus, I remembered Grandma a few pages ago as “petite and unopinionated”. My brother, when consulted, takes out his paintbrush and counterproposes “short and bossy.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “But there is panic and pandemonium waiting to break out inside all of us, of this I am convinced. I’ve seen it roar out among the dying, as a last protest against the human condition and its chronic sadness.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “Well, in one sense, I can’t know what it is that I don’t know. That’s philosophically self-evident.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “No, I was an odder old fool, grafting pathetic hopes of affection onto the least likely recipient in the world.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “I want a more difficult life, that’s all. What I really want is a first-rate life. I may not get it, but the only chance I have lies in getting out of a second-rate life. I may fail completely, but I do want to try. It’s to do with me, not you; so don’t worry.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “Perhaps I just feel safer with the history that’s been more or less agreed upon.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “Not that this let me off the hook. My younger self had come back to shock my older self with what that self had been, or was, or was sometimes capable of being. And only recently I’d been going on about how the witnesses to our lives decrease, and with them our essential corroboration. Now I had some all too unwelcome corroboration of what I was, or had been. If only this had been the document Veronica had set light to.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “Those in favour rarely stayed in favour; it was just a question of when they fell.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “And everything you do, or might achieve thereafter, is thinner, weaker, matters less. There is no echo coming back; no texture, no resonance, no depth of field.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “But he would never join their number, never be a member of the smiling retinue of former lovers. He considered that sort of behavior rather beastly, in fact immoral. He refused to be turned from a lover into a dear friend. He was uninterested in that transition.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “Noah couldn’t do anything without first wondering what He would think. Now that’s no way to go on. Always looking over your shoulder for approval – it’s not adult, is it?”
PREV 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 NEXT
Firsts Quotes
Reading Quotes
Quotes About Stories
Motivational Quotes
Inspirational Entrepreneurship Quotes
Positive Quotes
Albert Einstein Quotes
Startup Quotes
Steve Jobs Quotes
Success Quotes
Inspirational Quotes
Courage Quotes

Beautiful Wallpapers and Images

We hope you enjoyed our collection of 400 Julian Barnes Quotes.

All the images on this page were created with QuoteFancy Studio.

Use QuoteFancy Studio to create high-quality images for your desktop backgrounds, blog posts, presentations, social media, videos, posters, and more.

Learn more