707 Quotes by Julian Barnes

In those days, we imagined ourselves as being kept in some kind of holding pen, waiting to be released into our lives. And when the moment came, our lives – and time itself – would speed up. How were we to know that our lives had in any case begun, that some advantage had already been gained, some damage already inflicted? Also, that our release would only be into a larger holding pen, whose boundaries would be at first undiscernible.

You only followed where you were going if you wanted to get back to where you had started from, and she knew that was impossible.

Still, I’m not curious enough to find out. At this stage I prefer not to know.

I know this much: that there is objective time, but also subjective time, the kind you wear on the inside of your wrist, next to where the pulse lies. And this personal time, which is the true time, is measured in your relationship to memory. So when this strange thing happened – when these new memories suddenly came upon me – it was as if, for that moment, time had been placed in reverse. As if, for that moment, the river ran upstream.

Life and reading are not separate activities, When you read a great book, you don’t escape from life, you plunge deeper into it.

Martha was a clever girl, and therefore not a believer.

The self-doubt of the young is nothing compared to the self-doubt of the old. And this, perhaps, was their final triumph over him. Instead of killing him, they had allowed him to live, and by allowing him to live, they had killed him. This was the final, unanswerable irony to his life: that by allowing him to live, they had killed him.

But it’s still the eyes we look at, isn’t it? That’s where we found the other person.

Sarcasm is irony which has lost its soul.