Quote

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

Anita Brookner

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

Image
To remain pure, a novel has to cast a moral puzzle. Anything else is mere negotiation.
Anita Brookner
Image
Satire is dependent on strong beliefs, and on strong beliefs wounded.
Anita Brookner
Image
Accountability in friendship is the equivalent of love without strategy.
Anita Brookner
Image
I was brought up among the sort of self-important women who had a husband as one has an alibi.
Anita Brookner
Image
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.
Anita Brookner
Image
Writing has freed me from the despair of living.
Anita Brookner
Image
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
Image
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.
Anita Brookner
Image
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
Image
Like many rich men, he thought in anecdotes like many simple women, she thought in terms of biography.
Anita Brookner
Image
Dr Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature.
Anita Brookner
Image
That sun, that light had faded, and she had faded with them. Now she was as grey as the season itself.
Anita Brookner
Image
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.
Anita Brookner
Image
Problems of human behavior still continue to baffle us, but at least in the Library we have them properly filed.
Anita Brookner
Image
I am 46, and have been for some time past.
Anita Brookner
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I think you always feel braver in another language.
Anita Brookner
Image
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