707 Quotes by Julian Barnes

Love may not lead where we think or hope, but regardless of outcome it should be a call to seriousness and truth. If it is not that – if it is not moral in its effect – then love is no more than an exaggerated form of pleasure.

When I felt myself escaping from the earth,” he commented, “my reaction was not pleasure but happiness.” It was “a moral feeling,” he added. “I could hear myself living, so to speak.

Noah couldn’t do anything without first wondering what He would think. Now that’s no way to go on. Always looking over your shoulder for approval – it’s not adult, is it?

At best you have one of those debilitating conditions which come in many forms, and which some people decline to admit actually exist.

One feeling at least grows stronger in me with each year that passes – a longing to see the cranes. At this time of year I stand on a hill and watch the sky. Today they did not come. There were only wild geese. Geese would be beautiful if cranes did not exist.

The more so because, among its repetitions, it is always looking for new ways to prick you.

If you’re an old geezer in his rocker on the porch, you don’t play basketball with the kids. Old geezers don’t jump. You sit and make a virtue of what you have. And what you do is this: you make the kids think that anyone, anyone can jump, but it takes a wise old buzzard to know how to sit there and rock.

Heroes become traitors, traitors become martyrs.

Though why should we expect age to mellow us? If it isn’t life’s business to reward merit, why should it be life’s business to give us warm comfortable feelings towards its end? What possible evolutionary purpose could nostalgia serve?