707 Quotes by Julian Barnes

Well, in one sense, I can’t know what it is that I don’t know. That’s philosophically self-evident.

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.’ But I don’t feel part.

But he would never join their number, never be a member of the smiling retinue of former lovers. He considered that sort of behavior rather beastly, in fact immoral. He refused to be turned from a lover into a dear friend. He was uninterested in that transition.

They say time finds you out, don’t they?

Posterity will jump to conclusions: that is its nature.

Why does anything left-wing have to be trendy before it’s read, and by the time it’s trendy it’s already a force for conservatism?

Sometimes I think the purpose of life is to reconcile us to its eventual loss by wearing us down, by proving, however long it takes, that life isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

The notion of redefining the deity into something that works for you is grotesque.

And I thought of a cresting wave of water, lit by a moon, rushing past and vanishing upstream, pursued by a band of yelping students whose torchbeams criss-crossed in the dark. There is accumulation. There is responsibility. And beyond these, there is unrest. There is great unrest.