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Accountability in friendship is the equivalent of love without strategy.

Anita Brookner

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Anita Brookner
Age: 87 †
Born: 1928
Born: July 16
Died: 2016
Died: March 10
Art Historian
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
London
England
Accountability
Strategy
Friendship
Friends
Without
Love
Equivalent

More quotes by Anita Brookner

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In real life, it is the hare who wins. Every time. Look around you. And in any case it is my contention that Aesop was writing for the tortoise market. Hares have no time to read. They are too busy winning the game.
Anita Brookner
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No blame should attach to telling the truth. But it does, it does.
Anita Brookner
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All good fortune is a gift of the gods, and you don't win the favor of the ancient gods by being good, but by being bold.
Anita Brookner
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Writing has freed me from the despair of living.
Anita Brookner
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Existentialism is about being a saint without God being your own hero, without all the sanction and support of religion or society.
Anita Brookner
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Life... is not simply a series of exciting new ventures. The future is not always a whole new ball game. There tends to be unfinished business. One trails all sorts of things around with one, things that simply won't be got rid of.
Anita Brookner
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You never know what you will learn till you start writing. Then you discover truths you never knew existed.
Anita Brookner
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You can never betray the people who are dead, so you go on being a public Jew the dead can't answer slurs, but I'm here. I would love to think that Jesus wants me for a sunbeam, but he doesn't.
Anita Brookner
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You have no idea how promising the world begins to look once you have decided to have it all for yourself. And how much healthier your decisions are once they become entirely selfish.
Anita Brookner
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Life is a pilgrimage and if you don't play by the rules you don't find the Road to Damascus, you find the Crown of Thorns.
Anita Brookner
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One loses the capacity to grieve as a child grieves, or to rage as a child rages: hotly, despairingly, with tears of passion. One grows up, one becomes civilized, one learns one's manners, and consequently can no longer manage these two functions - sorrow and anger - adequately.
Anita Brookner
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And without understanding, could each properly love the other?
Anita Brookner
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A man can go from being a lover to being a stranger in three moves flat but a woman under the guise of friendship will engage in acts of duplicity which come to light very much later. There are different species of self-justification.
Anita Brookner
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Great writers are the saints for the godless.
Anita Brookner
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I suppose what one wants really is ideal company and books are ideal company.
Anita Brookner
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I think you always feel braver in another language.
Anita Brookner
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I was brought up among the sort of self-important women who had a husband as one has an alibi.
Anita Brookner
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You can never betray the people who are dead.
Anita Brookner
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Good women always think it is their fault when someone else is being offensive. Bad women never take the blame for anything.
Anita Brookner
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What is interesting about self-analysis is that it leads nowhere - it is an art form in itself.
Anita Brookner