"He thought of trying to explain something he had recently noticed about himself: that if anyone insulted him, or one of his friends, he didn't really ...
Life versus Death becomes, as Montaigne pointed out, Old Age versus Death.
~ Julian Barnes ~
Photo by Ákos Szabó
Photo by Ian Turnell
Life versus Death becomes, as Montaigne pointed out, Old Age versus Death.
More Julian Barnes quotes
"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 disa...
"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 fa...
"Perhaps grief, which destroys all patterns, destroys even more: the belief that any patterns exist. But we cannot, I think, survive without such belie...
"And what percentage of people take up the option to die off?’ She looked at me, her glance telling me to be calm. ‘Oh, a hundred per cent, of course. ...
"He always thought that Touie's long illness would somehow prepare him for her death. He always imagined that grief anf guilt, if they followed, would ...
"Arthur was frequently baffled by the complacency with which people went on with what they insouciantly called their lives, as if both the word and the...
"And perhaps it was also the case that, for all a lifetime's internal struggling, you were finally no more than what others saw you as. That was your n...
"Was it the case that colours dimmed as the eye grew elderly? Or was it rather that in youth your excitement about the world transferred itself onto ev...
"Life … is a bit like reading. … If all your responses to a book have already been duplicated and expanded upon by a professional critic, then what poi...
"When I was still quite young I had a complete presentiment of life. It was like the nauseating smell of cooking escaping from a ventilator: you don't ...
"Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't. I'm not surprised ...
"Remember the botched brothel-visit in L’Education sentimentale and remember its lesson. Do not participate: happiness lies in the imagination, not the...
"When you’re young you prefer the vulgar months, the fullness of the seasons. As you grow older you learn to like the in-between times, the months that...
"Is despair wrong? Isn’t it the natural condition of life after a certain age? … After a number of events, what is there left but repetition and dimini...