707 Quotes by Julian Barnes

Nature is so exact, it hurts exactly as much as it is worth, so in a way one relishes the pain, I think. If it didn’t matter, it wouldn’t matter.

We could not be further from ballooning’s established tropes: freedom, spiritual exaltation, human progress. Redon’s eternally open eye is deeply unsettling. The eye in the sky; God’s security camera. And that lumpish human head invites us to conclude that the colonisation of space doesn’t purify the colonisers; all that has happened is that we have brought our sinfulness to a new location.

We live on the flat, on the level, and yet – and so – we aspire. Groundlings, we can sometimes reach as far as the gods. Some soar with art, others with religion; most with love. But when we soar, we can also crash. There are few soft landings. We may find ourselves bouncing across the ground with leg-fracting force, dragged towards some foreign railway line. Every love story is a potential grief story. If not at first, then later. If not for one, then for the other. Sometimes, for both.

When I was still quite young I had a complete presentiment of life. It was like the nauseating smell of cooking escaping from a ventilator: you don’t have to have eaten it to know that it would make you throw up.

Yes, of course we were pretentious – what else is youth for?

Everything you wanted to say required a context. If you gave the full context, people thought you a rambling old fool. If you didn’t give the context, people thought you a laconic old fool.

Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time. Art does not exist for art’s sake: it exists for people’s sake.

Some admit the damage, and try to mitigate it; some spend their lives trying to help others who are damaged; and then there are those whose main concern is to avoid further damage to themselves, at whatever cost. And those are the ones who are ruthless, and the ones to be careful of.

History isn’t what happened, history is just what historians tell us.