Julian Barnes Quotes

“You're still in it. You'll always be in it. No, not literally. But in your heart. Nothing ever ends, not if it's gone that deep. You'll always be walking wounded. That's the only choice, after a while. Walking wounded, or dead. Don't you agree?”
― Julian Barnes, The Only Story

“And if you had no tongue, no celebrating language, you’d do this: cross your hands at the wrist with palms facing towards you; place your crossed wrists over your heart (the middle of your chest, anyway); then move your hands outwards a short distance, and open them towards the object of your love. It’s just as eloquent as speech.”
― Julian Barnes, A History of the World in 10½ Chapters

“I think there's a different authenticity to memory, and not an inferior one. Memory sorts and sifts according to the demands made on it by the rememberer.”
― Julian Barnes, The Only Story

“Does character develop over time? In novels, of course it does:otherwise there wouldn't be much of a story. But in life? I sometimes wonder. Our attitudes and opinions change we develop new habits and eccentricities; but that's something different, more like decoration. Perhaps character resembles intelligence, except that the character peaks a little later
;between twenty and thirty, say. And after that we're just stuck with what we've got. We're on our own. If so, that would explain a lot of lives, wouldn't it? And also if this isn't too grand a word--our tragedy.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“The verdict of the coroner's inquest had been that Adrian Finn (22) had killed himself 'while the balance of his mind was disturbed.' I remember how angry that conventional phrase made me: I would have sworn on oath that Adrian's was the one mind which would never lose its balance. But in the law's view, if you killed yourself you were by definition mad, at least at the time you were committing the act. The law, and society, and religion all said it was impossible to be sane, healthy, and kill yourself. Perhaps those authorities feared that the suicide's reasoning might impugn the nature and value of life as organised by the state which paid the coroner? And then, since you had been declared temporarily mad, your reasons for killing yourself were also assumed to be mad. So I doubt anyone paid much attention to Adrian's argument, with its references to philosophers ancient and modern, about the superiority of the intervening act over the unworthy passivity of merely letting life happen to you.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“Once bitten, twice shy; twice bitten, forever shy.”
― Julian Barnes, The Only Story

“The long answer was too time-consuming to give. The short answer was too painful. It went like this. It was a question of what heartbreak is, and how exactly the heart breaks, and what is left of it afterwards.”
― Julian Barnes, The Only Story

“You might even ask me to apply my 'theory' to myself and explain what damage I had suffered a long way back and what its consequences might be: for instance, how it might affect my reliability and truthfulness. I'm not sure I could answer this, to be honest.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“Still, as I tend to repeat, I have some instinct for survival, for self-preservation. And believing you have such an instinct is almost as good as actually having it, because it means you act in the same way.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“He never recorded the writer or the source: he didn't want to be bullied by reputation; truth should stand by itself, clear and unsupported.”
― Julian Barnes, The Only Story

“But if nostalgia means the powerful recollection of strong emotions—and a regret that such feelings are no longer present in our lives—then I plead guilty... And if we're talking about strong feelings that will never come again, I suppose it's possible to be nostalgic about remembered pain as well as remembered pleasure. And that opens up the field, doesn't it?”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“He felt life more clearly too—even, perhaps especially, when he came to decide that it wasn't worth the candle.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“The sadness of life. That was another conundrum he would occasionally ponder.”
― Julian Barnes, The Only Story

“Still, I'm not curious enough to find out. At this stage I prefer not to know.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“If Tony hadn't been fearful, hadn't counted on the approval of others for his own self-approval... and so on, through a succession of hypotheticals leading to the final one: so, for instance, if Tony hadn't been Tony.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“My younger self had come back to shock my older self with what that self had been, or was, or was sometimes capable of being. And only recently I’d been going on about how the witnesses to our lives decrease, and with them our essential corroboration. Now I had some all too unwelcome corroboration of what I was, or had been.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“And so, for the first time, I began to feel a more general remorse—a feeling somewhere between self-pity and self-hatred—about my whole life.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“No, I was an odder old fool, grafting pathetic hopes of affection onto the least likely recipient in the world.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“That next week was one of the loneliest of my life. There seemed nothing left to look forward to.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“The answers hardly seemed of consequence. Not much did. I thought of the things that had happened to me over the years, and of how little I had made happen.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“Perhaps a sense of death is like a sense of humour. We all think the one we've got - or haven't got - is just about right, and appropriate to the proper understanding of life. It's everyone else who's out of step.”
― Julian Barnes, Death

“Love means never having to say you're sorry (on the contrary, it frequently means doing just precisely that). Then there were all those love lines from all those love songs, with the swooning delusions of lyricist, singer, band.”
― Julian Barnes, The Only Story

“From love's absolutism to love's absolution? No: I don't believe in the cosy narratives of life some find necessary, just as I choke on comforting words like redemption and closure. Death is the only closure I believe in; and the wound will stay open until that final shutting of the doors. As for redemption, it's far too neat, a movie-maker's bromide; and beyond that, it feels like something grand, which human beings are too imperfect to deserve, much less bestow upon themselves.”
― Julian Barnes, The Only Story

“This last isn't something I actually saw, but what you end up remembering isn't always the same as what you have witnessed.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“Back in 'my day'—though I didn't claim ownership of it at the time, still less do I now...”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“But I was wrong about most things, then as now.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“When you're young—when I was young—you want your emotions to be like the ones you read about in books. You want them to overturn your life, create and define a new reality.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“I thought—at some level of my being, I actually thought—that I could go back to the beginning and change things. That I could make the blood flow backwards. I had the vanity to imagine—even if I didn't put it more strongly than this—that I could make Veronica like me again, and that it was important to do so.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“But the very action of naming something that subsequently happens—of wishing specific evil, and that evil coming to pass—this still has a shiver of the otherworldly about it.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“I replayed the words that would forever haunt me. As would Adrian's unfinished sentence: 'So, for instance, if Tony...' I knew I couldn't change, or mend, anything now.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending