Quote

Iconic Paris tells us: here are our three-star attractions, go thou and marvel. And so we gaze obediently at what we are told to gaze at, without exactly asking why.

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
Thou
Obediently
Star
Attractions
Exactly
Iconic
Asking
Marvel
Told
Gaze
Attraction
Stars
Paris
Three
Tells
Without

More quotes by Julian Barnes

Image
Reading is a majority skill but a minority art.
Julian Barnes
Image
The best form of government is one that is dying, because that means it’s giving way to something else.
Julian Barnes
Image
Books are where things are explained to you life is where things aren't.
Julian Barnes
Image
If you’re that clever you can argue yourself into anything.
Julian Barnes
Image
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.
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
Life … is a bit like reading. … If all your responses to a book have already been duplicated and expanded upon by a professional critic, then what point is there to your reading? Only that it’s yours. Similarly, why live your life? Because it’s yours. But what if such an answer becomes less and less convincing?
Julian Barnes
Image
Do we tend to recall the most important parts of a novel or those that speak most directly to us, the truest lines or the flashiest ones?
Julian Barnes
Image
Perhaps love is essential because it's unnecessary.
Julian Barnes
Image
You lose the world for a glance? Of course you do. That is what the world is for: to lose under the right circunstances.
Julian Barnes
Image
Global warming is more of a blessing than a curse.
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
The land of embarrassment and breakfast.
Julian Barnes
Image
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
Image
...God knows you can have complication and difficulty without any compensating depth or seriousness
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
This was long before the term 'single-parent family' came into use back then it was a 'broken home'.
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
The rainbow in place of the unicorn? Why didn't God just restore the unicorn? We animals would have been happier with that, instead of a big hint in the sky about God's magnanimity every time it stopped raining.
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