"The best form of government is one that is dying, because that means it’s giving way to something else."
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Quote collection
Julian Barnes quotes (page 4 of 10)
196 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"[Flaubert] didn’t just hate the railway as such; he hated the way it flattered people with the illusion of progress. What was the point of scientific advance without moral advance? The railway would merely permit more people to move about, meet and be stupid together."
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"Sometimes I think the purpose of life is to reconcile us to its eventual loss by wearing us down, by proving, however long it takes, that life isn't all it's cracked up to be."
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"In life, every ending is just the start of another story."
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"We live, we die, we are remembered, we are forgotten."
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"The companionship of dead writers is a wonderful form of live friendship."
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"It strikes me that this may be one of the differences between youth and age: when we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old, we invent different pasts for others."
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"Reading is a majority skill but a minority art."
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"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 can’t make up their minds. Perhaps it’s a way of admitting that things can’t ever bear the same certainty again."
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"The more you learn, the less you fear."
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"We live with such easy assumptions, don't we? For instance, that memory equals events plus time. But it's all much odder than this. Who was it said that memory is what we thought we'd forgotten? And it ought to be obvious to us that time doesn't act as a fixative, rather as a solvent. But it's not convenient--- it's not useful--- to believe this; it doesn't help us get on with our lives; so we ignore it."
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"Reading is a majority skill but a minority art. Yet nothing can replace the exact, complicated, subtle communion between absent author and entranced, present reader."
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"This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn't turn out to be like Literature."
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"Everything in art depends on execution: the story of a louse can be as beautiful as the story of Alexander. You must write according to your feelings, be sure those feelings are true, and let everything else go hang. When a line is good it ceases to belong to any school. A line of prose must be as immutable as a line of poetry."
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"The best life for a writer is the life which helps him write the best books he can."
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"There is accumulation. There is responsibility. And beyond this there is great unrest."
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"The better you know someone, the less well you often see them (and the less well they can therefore be transferred into fiction). They may be so close as to be out of focus, and there is no operating novelist to dispel the blur."
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"I remember laughing with relief that the same old adolescent boredom goes on from generation to generation. ...the words took me back to my own years of stagnancy, and that terrible waiting for life to begin. [p. 68]"
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"Had my life increased, or merely added to itself? There had been addition and subtraction in my life, but how much multiplication?"
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"The writer's life [is] full of frailty and defeat like any other life. What counts is the work. Yet the work can quite easily be buried, or half-buried, by the life."
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