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Time misspent in youth is sometimes all the freedom one ever has.

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
Youth
Freedom
Ever
Sometimes
Time
Misspent

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That sun, that light had faded, and she had faded with them. Now she was as grey as the season itself.
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Satire is dependent on strong beliefs, and on strong beliefs wounded.
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Great writers are the saints for the godless.
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Writing has freed me from the despair of living.
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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.
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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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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.
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Death is only a small interruption.
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It is best to marry for purely selfish reasons.
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For once a thing is known, it can never be unknown. It can only be forgotten.
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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.
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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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Romanticism is not just a mode it literally eats into every life. Women will never get rid of just waiting for the right man.
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I am 46, and have been for some time past.
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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.
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The lessons taught in great books are misleading. The commerce in life is rarely so simple and never so just.
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Always let them think of you as singing and dancing.
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I think you always feel braver in another language.
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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.
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Fiction is the great repository of the moral sense. The wicked get punished.
Anita Brookner