"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 always refused simplicity.
More Julian Barnes quotes
"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. ...
"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...
"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...
"Mariac tells us about the books he's read, the painters he's liked, the plays he's seen. He finds himself by looking in the works of others. He define...
"There is a grotesquerie to grief as well. You lose the sense of your existence being rational, or justifiable. You feel absurd.
"In life, every ending is just the start of another story.
"But life never lets you go, does it? You can't put down life the way you put down a book.
"Life versus Death becomes, as Montaigne pointed out, Old Age versus Death.
"It had been a slow and painful business, discovering that the theory of love did not match the reality of life. It was like expecting to be able to wr...