707 Quotes by Julian Barnes

Language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.

Love’s elastic. It’s not a question of watering down. It adds on. It doesn’t take away. So there’s no need to worry about that.

The orthodoxy runs, that if a marriage is founded on less than perfect truth it will always come to light. I don’t believe that. Marriage moves you further away from the examination of truth, not nearer to it.

To die from ‘a draining away of one’s strength caused by extreme old age’ was in Montaigne’s day a ‘rare, singular and extraordinary death.’ Nowadays we assume it as our right.

So now, contended indifference before Middlesbrough against Slovan Bratislava coexisted with a craving for an art in which violent, overwhelming, hysterical and destructive emotion was the norm.

One of the things he had learned in life, and which he hoped he could rely on, was that a greater pain drives out a lesser one. A strained muscle disappears before toothache, toothache disappears before a crushed finger. He hoped – it was his only hope now – that the pain of cancer, the pain of dying, would drive out the pains of love. It did not seem likely.

To be Russian was to be pessimistic; to be Soviet was to be optimistic.

We live in time – it holds us and moulds us – but I’ve never felt I understood it very well. And I’m not referring to theories about how it bends and doubles back, or may exist elsewhere in parallel versions. No, I mean ordinary, everyday time, which clocks and watches assure us passes regularly: tick-tock, click-clock. Is there anything more plausible than a second hand?

None of this, of course, was ever stated: the genteel social Darwinism of the English middle classes always remained implicit.