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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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Anita Brookner
Age: 87 †
Born: 1928
Born: July 16
Died: 2016
Died: March 10
Art Historian
Novelist
University Teacher
Writer
London
England
Feel
Feels
Things
Rely
Circumstances
Free
Hope
Energy
Moments

More quotes by Anita Brookner

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It will be a pity if women in the more conventional mould are to be phased out, for there will never be anyone to go home to.
Anita Brookner
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I was brought up among the sort of self-important women who had a husband as one has an alibi.
Anita Brookner
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When you make a break for freedom you don't necessarily find company on the way.
Anita Brookner
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Always let them think of you as singing and dancing.
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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Satire is dependent on strong beliefs, and on strong beliefs wounded.
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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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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Accountability in friendship is the equivalent of love without strategy.
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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And without understanding, could each properly love the other?
Anita Brookner
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Death is only a small interruption.
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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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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Existentialism is about being a saint without God being your own hero, without all the sanction and support of religion or society.
Anita Brookner
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You can never betray the people who are dead.
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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A man of such obvious and exemplary charm must be a liar.
Anita Brookner
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You never know what you will learn till you start writing. Then you discover truths you never knew existed.
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