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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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Anita Brookner
Age: 87 †
Born: 1928
Born: July 16
Died: 2016
Died: March 10
Art Historian
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
London
England
Unknown
Forgotten
Known
Thing
Never

More quotes by Anita Brookner

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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.
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
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Like many rich men, he thought in anecdotes like many simple women, she thought in terms of biography.
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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Writing has freed me from the despair of living.
Anita Brookner
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I am 46, and have been for some time past.
Anita Brookner
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There are moments when you feel free, moments when you have energy, moments when you have hope, but you can't rely on any of these things to see you through. Circumstances do that.
Anita Brookner
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I suppose what one wants really is ideal company and books are ideal company.
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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Great writers are the saints for the godless.
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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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.
Anita Brookner
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A man of such obvious and exemplary charm must be a liar.
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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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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Romanticism is not just a mode it literally eats into every life. Women will never get rid of just waiting for the right man.
Anita Brookner
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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.
Anita Brookner
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The self-fulfilled woman is far from reality.
Anita Brookner
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Time misspent in youth is sometimes all the freedom one ever has.
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