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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
Judaism
Betrayal
Betray
Dead
Never
People
Slurs
Sunbeams

More quotes by Anita Brookner

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Fiction is the great repository of the moral sense. The wicked get punished.
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No blame should attach to telling the truth. But it does, it does.
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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.
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To remain pure, a novel has to cast a moral puzzle. Anything else is mere negotiation.
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When you make a break for freedom you don't necessarily find company on the way.
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And without understanding, could each properly love the other?
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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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Real love is a pilgrimage. It happens when there is no strategy, but it is very rare because most people are strategists.
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For once a thing is known, it can never be unknown. It can only be forgotten.
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Time misspent in youth is sometimes all the freedom one ever has.
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I was brought up among the sort of self-important women who had a husband as one has an alibi.
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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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Dr Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature.
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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.
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Great writers are the saints for the godless.
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Always let them think of you as singing and dancing.
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It is best to marry for purely selfish reasons.
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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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