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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
Wicked
Fiction
Moral
Sense
Great
Repository
Punished

More quotes by Anita Brookner

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To remain pure, a novel has to cast a moral puzzle. Anything else is mere negotiation.
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Great writers are the saints for the godless.
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Writing has freed me from the despair of living.
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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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Dr Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature.
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For once a thing is known, it can never be unknown. It can only be forgotten.
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A man of such obvious and exemplary charm must be a liar.
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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.
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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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That sun, that light had faded, and she had faded with them. Now she was as grey as the season itself.
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I suppose what one wants really is ideal company and books are ideal company.
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I think you always feel braver in another language.
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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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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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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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Death is only a small interruption.
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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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Always let them think of you as singing and dancing.
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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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I was brought up among the sort of self-important women who had a husband as one has an alibi.
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