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Fiction is the great repository of the moral sense. The wicked get punished.

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
Moral
Sense
Great
Repository
Punished
Wicked
Fiction

More quotes by Anita Brookner

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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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It is best to marry for purely selfish reasons.
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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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To remain pure, a novel has to cast a moral puzzle. Anything else is mere negotiation.
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When you make a break for freedom you don't necessarily find company on the way.
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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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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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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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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.
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Dr Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature.
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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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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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You never know what you will learn till you start writing. Then you discover truths you never knew existed.
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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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Writing novels preserves you in a state of innocence - a lot passes you by - simply because your attention is otherwise diverted.
Anita Brookner
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Writing has freed me from the despair of living.
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No blame should attach to telling the truth. But it does, it does.
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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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I was brought up among the sort of self-important women who had a husband as one has an alibi.
Anita Brookner