Quote

Sometimes I think the purpose of life is to reconcile us to its eventual loss by wearing us down, by proving, however long it takes, that life isn't all it's cracked up to be.

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
Loss
Takes
Eventual
Purpose
Proving
Sometimes
Reconcile
Long
Cracked
Think
Wearing
Thinking
However
Life
Prove

More quotes by Julian Barnes

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[Flaubert] didn’t just hate the railway as such he hated the way it flattered people with the illusion of progress. What was the point of scientific advance without moral advance? The railway would merely permit more people to move about, meet and be stupid together.
Julian Barnes
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Time...give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.
Julian Barnes
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When you read a great book, you don’t escape from life, you plunge deeper into it. There may be a superficial escape – into different countries, mores, speech patterns – but what you are essentially doing is furthering your understanding of life’s subtleties, paradoxes, joys, pains and truths. Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic.
Julian Barnes
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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.
Julian Barnes
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I hate the way the English have of not being serious about being serious, I really hate it.
Julian Barnes
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May you be ordinary, as the poet once wished the new-born baby.
Julian Barnes
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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
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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.
Julian Barnes
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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
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I have an instinct for survival, for self-preservation.
Julian Barnes
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I don't believe in God, but I miss him.
Julian Barnes
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If these are indeed the spirits of Englishmen and Englishwomen who have passed over into the next world, surely they would know how to form a proper queue?
Julian Barnes
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The more you learn, the less you fear.
Julian Barnes
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But life never lets you go, does it? You can't put down life the way you put down a book.
Julian Barnes
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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
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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
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Memories of childhood were the dreams that stayed with you after you woke.
Julian Barnes
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We live in time, it bounds us and defines us, and time is supposed to measure history, isn't it? But if we can't understand time, can't grasp its mysteries of pace and progress, what chance do we have with history--even our own small, personal, largely undocumented piece of it?
Julian Barnes
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But then you begin to understand that the reward of merit is not life’s business.
Julian Barnes
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To own a certain book - and to choose it without help - is to define yourself.
Julian Barnes