Julian Barnes Quotes - Page 2

[Flaubert] didn’t just hate the railway as such; he hated the way it flattered people with the illusion of progress. What was the point of scientific advance without moral advance? The railway would merely permit more people to move about, meet and be stupid together.

And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability.

This was long before the term 'single-parent family' came into use; back then it was a 'broken home'...

History isn't the lies of the victors, as I once glibly assured Old Joe Hunt; I know that now. It's more the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious or defeated.

Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time's malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing-until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return.

...I need to return briefly to a few incidents that have grown into anecdotes, to some approximate memories which time has deformed into certainty.

Vieni jausmai laiką pagreitina, kiti sulėtina, o kartais atrodo, kad jis dingsta - kol galop ateina akimirka, kai jis iš tiesų dingsta ir jau niekada nebesugrįžta

you find yourself repeating, ‘They grow up so quickly, don’t they?’ when all you really mean is: time goes faster for me nowadays.

Women scheme when they are weak, they lie out of fear. Men scheme when they are strong, they lie out of arrogance.

The greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonorably, foolishly, viciously.

The best form of government is one that is dying, because that means it’s giving way to something else.

Reading is a majority skill but a minority art.

Love is just a system for getting someone to call you Darling after sex.

Taxi-drivers in Frankfurt are said to dislike the annual Book Fair because literary folk, instead of being shuttled to prostitutes like respectable members of other convening professions, prefer to stay in their hotels and fuck one another

The constant tug between nature and civilization is what keeps on our toes. Though of course, that did rather beg the question of how you defined nature and how you defined civilization.

One weekend in the vacation, I was invited to meet her family. They lived in Kent, out on the Orpington line, in one of those suburbs which had stopped concreting over nature at the very last minute, and ever since smugly claimed rural status.

You can deal with the brain, as I say; it looks sensible, whereas the heart, the human heart, I'm afraid, looks a fucking mess.

What was the point of having a situation worthy of fiction if the protagonist didn't behave as he would have done in a book?

For the point is this: not that myth refers us back to some original event which has been fancifully transcribed as it passed through collective memory; but that it refers us forward to something that will happen, that must happen. Myth will become reality, however sceptical we might be.

But art and religion will always shadow one another through the abstract nouns they both invoke: truth, seriousness, imagination, sympathy, morality, transcendence.