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To remain pure, a novel has to cast a moral puzzle. Anything else is mere negotiation.

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
Mere
Pure
Novel
Puzzle
Moral
Negotiation
Else
Puzzles
Anything
Cast
Writing
Casts
Remain

More quotes by Anita Brookner

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And without understanding, could each properly love the other?
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Great writers are the saints for the godless.
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Time misspent in youth is sometimes all the freedom one ever has.
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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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Life... is not simply a series of exciting new ventures. The future is not always a whole new ball game. There tends to be unfinished business. One trails all sorts of things around with one, things that simply won't be got rid of.
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Fiction is the great repository of the moral sense. The wicked get punished.
Anita Brookner
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Accountability in friendship is the equivalent of love without strategy.
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Dr Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature.
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Good women always think it is their fault when someone else is being offensive. Bad women never take the blame for anything.
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Satire is dependent on strong beliefs, and on strong beliefs wounded.
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For once a thing is known, it can never be unknown. It can only be forgotten.
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I think you always feel braver in another language.
Anita Brookner
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It is best to marry for purely selfish reasons.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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The essence of romantic love is that wonderful beginning, after which sadness and impossibility may become the rule.
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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