Quote

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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Anita Brookner
Age: 87 †
Born: 1928
Born: July 16
Died: 2016
Died: March 10
Art Historian
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
London
England
Jesus
Betrayed
Doesn
Betray
Never
Jew
Would
Answer
Love
Dead
Sunbeam
Think
Wants
Slurs
Thinking
Answers
Sunbeams
People
Public
Judaism

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Always let them think of you as singing and dancing.
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Accountability in friendship is the equivalent of love without strategy.
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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.
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To remain pure, a novel has to cast a moral puzzle. Anything else is mere negotiation.
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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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Time misspent in youth is sometimes all the freedom one ever has.
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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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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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Great writers are the saints for the godless.
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And without understanding, could each properly love the other?
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The self-fulfilled woman is far from reality.
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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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You can never betray the people who are dead.
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For once a thing is known, it can never be unknown. It can only be forgotten.
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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.
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I suppose what one wants really is ideal company and books are ideal company.
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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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Fiction is the great repository of the moral sense. The wicked get punished.
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Satire is dependent on strong beliefs, and on strong beliefs wounded.
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You never know what you will learn till you start writing. Then you discover truths you never knew existed.
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