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
Would
Answer
Love
Dead
Sunbeam
Think
Wants
Slurs
Thinking
Answers
Sunbeams
People
Public
Judaism
Jesus
Betrayed
Doesn
Betray
Never
Jew

More quotes by Anita Brookner

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Existentialism is about being a saint without God being your own hero, without all the sanction and support of religion or society.
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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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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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Fiction is the great repository of the moral sense. The wicked get punished.
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To remain pure, a novel has to cast a moral puzzle. Anything else is mere negotiation.
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Dr Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature.
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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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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 never know what you will learn till you start writing. Then you discover truths you never knew existed.
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I am 46, and have been for some time past.
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Always let them think of you as singing and dancing.
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And without understanding, could each properly love the other?
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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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The essence of romantic love is that wonderful beginning, after which sadness and impossibility may become the rule.
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Death is only a small interruption.
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No blame should attach to telling the truth. But it does, it does.
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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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Great writers are the saints for the godless.
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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