Quote

we must be precise with love, its language and its gestures. If it is to save us, we must look at it as clearly as we should learn to look at death

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
Death
Look
Looks
Gestures
Must
Precise
Love
Clearly
Save
Learn
Language

More quotes by Julian Barnes

Image
Global warming is more of a blessing than a curse.
Julian Barnes
Image
Discovering, for example, that as witnesses to your life diminish, there is less corroboration, and therefore less certainty, as to what you are or have been. [p. 65]
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
The more you learn, the less you fear.
Julian Barnes
Image
Love is just a system for getting someone to call you darling after sex.
Julian Barnes
Image
In Britain I'm sometimes regarded as a suspiciously Europeanized writer, who has this rather dubious French influence.
Julian Barnes
Image
What makes us want to know the worst? Is it that we tire of preferring to know the best? Does curiosity always hurdle self-interest? Or is it, more simply, that wanting to know the worst is love's favorite perversion.
Julian Barnes
Image
Time...give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.
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
If you remember your past too well you start blaming your present for it. Look what they did to me, that's what caused me to be like this, it's not my fault. Permit me to correct you: it probably is your fault. And kindly spare me the details.
Julian Barnes
Image
Memories of childhood were the dreams that stayed with you after you woke.
Julian Barnes
Image
We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but were only being cowardly. What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things rather than facing them.
Julian Barnes
Image
One of the troubles is this: the heart isn't heart-shaped.
Julian Barnes
Image
Loving humanity means as much, and as little, as loving raindrops, or loving the Milky Way. You say that you love humanity? Are you sure you aren’t treating yourself to easy self-congratulation, seeking approval, making certain you’re on the right side?
Julian Barnes
Image
I have an instinct for survival, for self-preservation.
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
I have at times tried to imagine the despair which leads to suicide, attempted to conjure up the slew and slop of darkness in which only death appears as a pinprick of light: in other words, the exact opposite of the normal condition of life.
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
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.
Julian Barnes
Image
Most people, in my opinion, steal much of what they are. If they didn't what poor items they would be.
Julian Barnes