707 Quotes by Julian Barnes

What you end up remembering isn't always the same as what you have witnessed.

I know this much: that there is objective time, but also subjective time, the kind you wear on the inside of your wrist, next to where the pulse lies. And this personal time, which is the true time, is measured in your relationship to memory.

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.

He had a better mind and a more rigorous temperament than me; he thought logically, and then acted on the conclusion of logical thought. Whereas most of us, I suspect, do the opposite: we make an instinctive decision, then build up an infrastructure of reasoning to justify it. And call the result common sense.

I think there's a different authenticity to memory, and not an inferior one. Memory sorts and sifts according to the demands made on it by the rememberer.

Was this their exact exchange? Almost certainly not. Still, it is my best memory of their exchange.

This [...] isn`t something I actually saw, but what you end up remembering isn`t always the same as what you witnessed.

Time doesn't act as a fixative, rather as a solvent.

Ragana, pagalvojau. Jeigu pasaulyje yra moteris, kurią gali įsimylėti ir vis tiek manyti, kad gyvenimo verta atsisakyti, tai toji moteris yra Veronika.