Quote

Writing novels preserves you in a state of innocence - a lot passes you by - simply because your attention is otherwise diverted.

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
States
Preserves
Writing
Novels
Innocence
Otherwise
Novel
Simply
Attention
Diverted
State
Passes

More quotes by Anita Brookner

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It is best to marry for purely selfish reasons.
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.
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Fiction is the great repository of the moral sense. The wicked get punished.
Anita Brookner
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Like many rich men, he thought in anecdotes like many simple women, she thought in terms of biography.
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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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It will be a pity if women in the more conventional mould are to be phased out, for there will never be anyone to go home to.
Anita Brookner
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Great writers are the saints for the godless.
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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Romanticism is not just a mode it literally eats into every life. Women will never get rid of just waiting for the right man.
Anita Brookner
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The essence of romantic love is that wonderful beginning, after which sadness and impossibility may become the rule.
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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Problems of human behavior still continue to baffle us, but at least in the Library we have them properly filed.
Anita Brookner
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Writing has freed me from the despair of living.
Anita Brookner
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The lessons taught in great books are misleading. The commerce in life is rarely so simple and never so just.
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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Accountability in friendship is the equivalent of love without strategy.
Anita Brookner
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A man of such obvious and exemplary charm must be a liar.
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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I am 46, and have been for some time past.
Anita Brookner
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When you make a break for freedom you don't necessarily find company on the way.
Anita Brookner