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You can never betray the people who are dead.

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
People
Slurs
Sunbeams
Judaism
Betrayal
Betray
Dead
Never

More quotes by 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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Always let them think of you as singing and dancing.
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
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I think you always feel braver in another language.
Anita Brookner
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For once a thing is known, it can never be unknown. It can only be forgotten.
Anita Brookner
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A man of such obvious and exemplary charm must be a liar.
Anita Brookner
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Time misspent in youth is sometimes all the freedom one ever has.
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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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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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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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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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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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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No blame should attach to telling the truth. But it does, it does.
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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That sun, that light had faded, and she had faded with them. Now she was as grey as the season itself.
Anita Brookner
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I am 46, and have been for some time past.
Anita Brookner
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I need noise and interruptions and irritation: irritation and discomfort are a great starter. The loneliness of doing it any other way would kill me.
Anita Brookner
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It is best to marry for purely selfish reasons.
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