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Top 400 Julian Barnes Quotes (2025 Update)
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Julian Barnes Quote: “And who does not want their love authenticated?”
Julian Barnes Quote: “Had she told him that she loved him? Yes, of course, many times; but it was his imagination – the prompter’s voice at his ear – which had added the words “for ever.” He hadn’t asked what she meant when she told him she loved him. What lover ever does? Those plush and gilded words rarely seem to need annotation at the time.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “It seemed to me that we ought occasionally to be reminded of instability beneath our feet.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “First love fixes a life for ever: this much I have discovered over the years. It may not outrank subsequent loves, but they will always be affected by its existence.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “You only followed where you were going if you wanted to get back to where you had started from, and she knew that was impossible.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “In those days, we imagined ourselves as being kept in some kind of holding pen, waiting to be released into our lives. And when the moment came, our lives – and time itself – would speed up. How were we to know that our lives had in any case begun, that some advantage had already been gained, some damage already inflicted? Also, that our release would only be into a larger holding pen, whose boundaries would be at first undiscernible.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “What did I care about saving the world if the world couldn’t, wouldn’t, save her?”
Julian Barnes Quote: “Life always refused simplicity.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “When I felt myself escaping from the earth,” he commented, “my reaction was not pleasure but happiness.” It was “a moral feeling,” he added. “I could hear myself living, so to speak.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “Adrian, however, pushed us to believe in the application of thought to life, in the notion.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “They say things are determined by genetics, by parenting, by heredity, by climate, by diet, by geography, by time spent in the womb, by nature, by nurture. They fail to hear the elephant in the room, trumpeting away: history.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “People prefer to get what they want rather than what they deserve.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “Some admit the damage, and try to mitigate it; some spend their lives trying to help others who are damaged; and then there are those whose main concern is to avoid further damage to themselves, at whatever cost. And those are the ones who are ruthless, and the ones to be careful of.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “And you can never prepare for this new reality in which you have been dunked.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “One of the first things she asked me was why I wore my watch on the inside of my wrist. I couldn’t justify it, so I turned the face round, and put time on the outside, as normal, grown-up people did.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “You remembered your past in cheerful terms because this validated your existence. You didn’t have to see your life as any kind of triumph – his own had hardly been that – but you did need to tell yourself that it had been interesting, enjoyable, purposeful.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “They say time finds you out, don’t they?”
Julian Barnes Quote: “What happened to the truth is not recorded.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “Is it splendid, or stupid, to take life seriously?”
Julian Barnes Quote: “Constantly he went back over the evidence of his memories.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “Logic: yes, where is logic? Where is it, for instance, in the next moment of my story?”
Julian Barnes Quote: “Then I thought about Adrian. My old friend who had killed himself. And this had been the last communication he had ever received from me. A libel on his character and an attempt to destroy the first and last love affair of his life. And when I had written that time would tell, I had underestimated, or rather miscalculated: time was telling not against them, it was telling against me.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “This was hopeless. In a novel, Adrian wouldn’t just have accepted things as they were put to him. What was the point of having a situation worthy of fiction if the protagonist didn’t behave as he would have done in a book? Adrian should have gone snooping, or saved up his pocket money and employed a private detective; perhaps all four of us should have gone off on a Quest to Discover the Truth. Or would that have been less like literature and too much like a kids’ story?”
Julian Barnes Quote: “If you saved yourself, you might also save those around you, those you loved. And since you would do anything in the world to save those you loved, you did anything in the world to save yourself. And because there was no choice, equally there was no possibility of avoiding moral corruption. –.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “Perhaps Goethe never found the right woman.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “Strange how, when you are young, you owe no duty to the future; but when you are old, you owe a duty to the past. To the one thing you can’t change.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “Je zit er nog middenin. Je zult er altijd middenin blijven zitten. Nee, niet letterlijk. Maar in je hart. Niets houdt ooit op, niet als het zo diep is gaan zitten. Je zult altijd met een open wond blijven rondlopen. Dat is na verloop van tijd nog de enige keus. Met een open wond rondlopen of dood. Denk je ook niet?”
Julian Barnes Quote: “Have you anything to declare? Yes, I’d like to declare a small case of French flu, a dangerous fondness for Flaubert, a childish delight in French road-signs, and a love of the light as you look north. Is there any duty to pay on any of these? There ought to be.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “A woman’s right to choose – yes, I believed in that, theoretically and actually. Though I also believed in a man’s right to be consulted.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “We all pursue what we think is best for us, even if it means our extinction. Sometimes, especially if it means that.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “Monomania. Monogamy. Monotony. Nothing good begins this way.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “The long answer was too time-consuming to give. The short answer was too painful. It went like this. It was a question of what heartbreak is, and how exactly the heart breaks, and what is left of it afterwards.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “He felt life more clearly too – even, perhaps especially, when he came to decide that it wasn’t worth the candle.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “If I call myself an atheist at twenty, and an agnostic at fifty and sixty, it isn’t because I have acquired more knowledge in the meantime: just more awareness of ignorance.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “Once, we were talking about public reaction to some political scandal, and I suggested that it was normal for people to need someone to blame. ‘Normal doesn’t mean it’s a good idea,’ she answered.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “But if you think that only what is yours is yours, and that what is not your own is, just as it is, not your own, then no one will ever coerce you, no one will hinder you, you will blame no one, you will not accuse anyone, you will not do a single thing unwillingly, you will have no enemies, and no one will harm you, because you will not be harmed at all.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “Love’s elastic. It’s not a question of watering down. It adds on. It doesn’t take away. So there’s no need to worry about that.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “He never recorded the writer or the source: he didn’t want to be bullied by reputation; truth should stand by itself, clear and unsupported.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “He had discovered love; but he had also begun to discover that love, far from making him ‘what he was’, far from spreading deep content all over him like carnation oil, would make him self-conscious and indecisive. He loved Tanya most clearly when he was away from her. When they were together, there were expectations on both sides which he was either unable to identify or couldn’t respond to.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “When I tell people that she was the most grown-up person I have known, I suppose what I mean is that there were principles very close behind, if not actually embedded in, all her actions and thoughts.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “He said that there were three preconditions for happiness – stupidity, selfishness and good health.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “One secret of the Christian religion’s success was always to employ the best moviemakers.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “And first love always happens in the overwhelming first person. How can it not? Also, in the overwhelming present tense. It takes us time to realise that there are other persons, and other tenses.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “And secondly, reducing the diversity between people didn’t result in harmony within. The narcissism of small differences ensured this.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “That next week was one of the loneliest of my life. There seemed nothing left to look forward to.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “Enforced monogamy is as much to say enforced happiness, which we know is not possible. Unenforced monogamy might seem possible. Romantic monogamy might seem to be desirable. But the first normally collapses back into a version of enforced monogamy, while the second is liable to become obsessive and hysterical. And thereby lies close to monomania. We should always distinguish between mutual passion and shared monomania.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “Well, getting our history wrong is part of being a person.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “There was an old char who came twice a week, Mrs. Dyer; she had poor eyesight for cleaning but perfect vision for stealing vegetables and pints of milk. But who else came to the house? No friends were mentioned. Each weekend, Macleod played a round of golf; Susan had the tennis club. In all the times I joined them for supper, I never met anyone else.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “But what helps? What do we need to know? Not everything. Everything confuses. Directness also confuses. The full-face portrait staring back at you hypnotises. Flaubert is usually looking away in his portraits and photographs. He’s looking away so that you can’t catch his eye; he’s also looking away because what he can see over your shoulder is more interesting than your shoulder.”
Julian Barnes Quote: “From what I did and what I said Let them not seek to find who I was.”
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