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

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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
Seems
Meet
Rarely
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

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You can put it another way, of course you always can.
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And perhaps it was also the case that, for all a lifetime's internal struggling, you were finally no more than what others saw you as. That was your nature, whether you liked it or not.
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Wisdom consists partly in not pretending anymore, in discarding artifice.
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You lose the world for a glance? Of course you do. That is what the world is for: to lose under the right circunstances.
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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.
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The writer has little control over personal temperament, none over historical moment, and is only partly in charge of his or her own aesthetic.
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I hate the way the English have of not being serious about being serious, I really hate it.
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In life, every ending is just the start of another story.
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Reading is a majority skill but a minority art.
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Most people, in my opinion, steal much of what they are. If they didn't what poor items they would be.
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It took me some years to clear my head of what Paris wanted me to admire about it, and to notice what I preferred instead. Not power-ridden monuments, but individual buildings which tell a quieter story: the artist's studio, or the Belle Epoque house built by a forgotten financier for a just-remembered courtesan.
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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.
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Global warming is more of a blessing than a curse.
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History isn't what happened, history is just what historians tell us.
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But that’s one advantage of fiction, you can speed up time.
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Well, they each seem to do one thing well enough, but fail to realize that literature depends on doing several things well at the same time.
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The greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonorably, foolishly, viciously.
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Books are where things are explained to you life is where things aren't.
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When I was still quite young I had a complete presentiment of life. It was like the nauseating smell of cooking escaping from a ventilator: you don't have to have eaten it to know that it would make you throw up.
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In Britain I'm sometimes regarded as a suspiciously Europeanized writer, who has this rather dubious French influence.
Julian Barnes