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I suppose what one wants really is ideal company and books are ideal company.

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
Wants
Books
Company
Book
Really
Ideal
Suppose
Ideals

More quotes by Anita Brookner

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Real love is a pilgrimage. It happens when there is no strategy, but it is very rare because most people are strategists.
Anita Brookner
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Fiction is the great repository of the moral sense. The wicked get punished.
Anita Brookner
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To remain pure, a novel has to cast a moral puzzle. Anything else is mere negotiation.
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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It is best to marry for purely selfish reasons.
Anita Brookner
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A complete woman is probably not a very admirable creature. She is manipulative, uses other people to get her own way, and works within whatever system she is in.
Anita Brookner
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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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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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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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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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You can never betray the people who are dead.
Anita Brookner
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I am 46, and have been for some time past.
Anita Brookner
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Great writers are the saints for the godless.
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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I think you always feel braver in another language.
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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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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And without understanding, could each properly love the other?
Anita Brookner
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Death is only a small interruption.
Anita Brookner
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The evening passes somehow I watch television with Nancy, or I write. It is difficult, not having a family, and it is difficult to explain. I always go to bed early. And I am always ready for Monday morning, that time that other people dread.
Anita Brookner