707 Quotes by Julian Barnes

Be to, tas skausmas truko neilgai. Kaip minėjau, turiu stiprų savisaugos instinktą. Man pavyko išstumti Veroniką iš širdies ir iš gyvenimo

This last isn't something I actually saw, but what you end up remembering isn't always the same as what you have witnessed.

She has only a ghostplay on some frayed screen of memory, which she takes to be the present.

I blushed. You haven't seen a bald man in his sixties blush? Oh, it happens, just as it does to a hairy, spotty fifteen-year-old. And because it's rarer, it sends the blusher tumbling back to that time when life felt like nothing more than one long sequence of embarrassments.

...I need to return briefly to a few incidents that have grown into anecdotes, to some approximate memories which time has deformed into certainty.

How submerged does a reference have to be before it drowns?

And even when he guessed that the love stories of the misled and the forsaken had become a little less authentic with each retelling . . . even if this was the case, he was still moved. Indeed, he was more moved by the lives of the bereft and the unchosen than he was by stories of success in love.

You can define a net two ways, depending on your point of view. Normally you would say it is a meshed instrument designed to catch fish. But you could, with no great injury to logic, reverse the image and define the net as a jocular lexicographer once did: he called it a collection of holes tied together with string.

My parents' marriage, to my unforgiving nineteen-year-old eye, was a car crash of cliché. Though I would have to admit, as the one making the judgement, that a 'car crash of of cliché' is itself a cliché.