707 Quotes by Julian Barnes

So, you see, we’re a played-out generation. All the best ones went. We were left with the lesser ones. It’s always like that in war. That’s why it’s up to your generation now.

The final tormenting, unanswerable question: what is 'success' in mourning?

I wish life was like banking,' I said. 'I don't mean it's straightforward. Some of it's incredibly complicated. But you can understand it in the end, if you try hard enough. Or there's someone, somewhere, who understands it, even if only afterwards, after it's too late. The trouble with life, it seems to me, is that it can turn out to be too late and you still haven't understood it.

specific fund, you see. It’s a sort of general fund. Because at some point everyone wants to run away from their life. It’s about the only thing human beings have in common.

You can put it another way, of course; you always can.

I thought—at some level of my being, I actually thought—that I could go back to the beginning and change things. That I could make the blood flow backwards. I had the vanity to imagine—even if I didn't put it more strongly than this—that I could make Veronica like me again, and that it was important to do so.

His pattern of life for twenty years and more had been a demonstration of how to be impulsive and careful at the same time. And his generosity to others also came, like a pack of bacon, with a ‘use by’ date on it.

What could be put up against the noise of time? Only that music which is inside ourselves - the music of our being - which is transformed by some into real music. Which, over the decades, if it is string and true and pure enough to drown out the noise of time, is transformed into the whisper of history.

A woman’s right to choose — yes, I believed in that, theoretically and actually. Though I also believed in a man’s right to be consulted.