707 Quotes by Julian Barnes

We're leaving," I told her one July afternoon."We? You and I? Where are we going, young Master Paul? Do you have your belongings tied up in a red-spotted handkerchief on a stick?

Mystification is simple; clarity is the hardest thing of all.

For most of us, the first experience of love, even if it doesn’t work out—perhaps especially when it doesn’t work out—promises that here is the thing that validates, that vindicates life. And though subsequent years might alter this view, until some of us give up on it altogether, when love first strikes, there’s nothing like it, is there? Agreed?

He knew what they said of him locally: Oh, he likes to keep himself to himself. The phrase was descriptive, not judgemental. It was a principle of life the English still respected. And it wasn't just about privacy, about an Englishman's home—even a pebbledash semi—being his castle. It was about something more: about the self, and where you kept it, and who, if anyone, was allowed to fully see it.

A pier is a disappointed bridge; yet stare at it for long enough and you can dream it to the other side of the Channel.

Once bitten, twice shy; twice bitten, forever shy.

Though sometimes, first love cauterises the heart, and all any searcher will find thereafter is scar tissue.

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.

The companionship of dead writers is a wonderful form of live friendship.