Quote

How rarely do our emotions meet the object they seem to deserve? How hopelessly we signal how dark the sky how big the waves. We are all lost at sea, washed between hope and despair, hailing something that may never come to rescue us.

Julian Barnes

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Julian Barnes
Age: 78
Born: 1946
Born: January 19
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Translator
Writer
Leicester
England
J. Barnes
J Barnes
Edward Pygge
Julian Patrick Barnes
May
Objects
Emotions
Hailing
Come
Seem
Wave
Hopelessly
Something
Emotion
Object
Signal
Never
Dark
Sky
Washed
Hope
Despair
Signals
Bigs
Sea
Rescue
Lost
Deserve
Waves
Seems
Meet
Rarely

More quotes by Julian Barnes

Image
When we're young, everyone over the age of thirty looks middle-aged, everyone over fifty antique. And time, as it goes by, confirms that we weren't that wrong. Those little age differentials, so crucial and so gross when we are young erode. We end up all belonging to the same category, that of the non-young. I've never much minded this myself.
Julian Barnes
Image
Love may not lead where we think or hope, but regardless of outcome it should be a call to seriousness and truth. If it is not that - if it is not moral in its effect - then love is no more than an exaggerated form of pleasure.
Julian Barnes
Image
What is the easiest, the most comfortable thing for a writer to do? To congratulate the society in which he lives: to admire its biceps, applaud its progress, tease it endearingly about its follies.
Julian Barnes
Image
One of the troubles is this: the heart isn't heart-shaped.
Julian Barnes
Image
He had a better mind and a more rigorous temperament than me he thought logically, and then acted on the conclusion of logical thought. Whereas most of us, I suspect, do the opposite: we make an instinctive decision, then build up an infrastructure of reasoning to justify it. And call the result common sense.
Julian Barnes
Image
He didn’t really like travel, of course. He liked the idea of travel, and the memory of travel, but not travel itself.
Julian Barnes
Image
Novels tell us the most truth about life: what it is, how we live it, what it might be for, how we enjoy and value it, and how we lose it.
Julian Barnes
Image
Yes, of course we were pretentious -- what else is youth for?
Julian Barnes
Image
Nature is so exact, it hurts exactly as much as it is worth, so in a way one relishes the pain. If it didn't matter, it wouldn't matter.
Julian Barnes
Image
The greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonorably, foolishly, viciously.
Julian Barnes
Image
People in love, it is well known, suffer extreme conceptual delusions, the most common of these being that other people find your condition as thrilling and eye-watering as you do yourselves.
Julian Barnes
Image
To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness.
Julian Barnes
Image
The writer has little control over personal temperament, none over historical moment, and is only partly in charge of his or her own aesthetic.
Julian Barnes
Image
In 1980, I published my first novel, in the usual swirl of unjustified hope and justified anxiety.
Julian Barnes
Image
You can put it another way, of course you always can.
Julian Barnes
Image
The better you know someone, the less well you often see them (and the less well they can therefore be transferred into fiction). They may be so close as to be out of focus, and there is no operating novelist to dispel the blur.
Julian Barnes
Image
Global warming is more of a blessing than a curse.
Julian Barnes
Image
In an oppressive society the truth-telling nature of literature is of a different order, and sometimes valued more highly than other elements in a work of art.
Julian Barnes
Image
He always thought that Touie's long illness would somehow prepare him for her death. He always imagined that grief anf guilt, if they followed, would be more clear-edged, more defined, more finite. Instead they seem like weather, like clouds constantly re-forming into new shapes, blown by nameless, unidentifiable winds.
Julian Barnes
Image
If a man cannot tell what he wants to do, then he must find out what he ought to do. If desire has become complicated, then hold fast to duty.
Julian Barnes