The Only Story Quotes

“Would you rather love the more, and suffer the more; or love the less, and suffer the less? That is, I think, finally, the only real question.”
― Julian Barnes, The Only Story

“Most of us have only one story to tell. I don’t mean that only one thing happens to us in our lives: there are countless events, which we turn into countless stories. But there’s only one that matters, only one finally worth telling.”
― Julian Barnes, The Only Story

“And by that time he had made the most terrifying discovery of his life, one which probably cast a shadow over all his subsequent relationships: the realization that most love, even the most ardent and the most sincere, can, given the correct assault, curdle into a mixture of pity and anger.”
― Julian Barnes, The Only Story

“Perhaps love could never be captured in a definition; it could only ever be captured in a story.”
― Julian Barnes, The Only Story

“Love was by its very nature disruptive, cataclysmic; and if it was not, then it was not love.”
― Julian Barnes, The Only Story

“Strange how, when you are young, you owe no duty to the future; but when you are old, you owe a duty to the past. To the one thing you can’t change.”
― Julian Barnes, The Only Story

“You realize how sympathy and antagonism can coexist. You are discovering how many seemingly incompatible emotions can thrive, side by side, in the same human heart.”
― Julian Barnes, The Only Story

“[...]Because at some point everyone wants to run away from their life. It's about the only thing human beings have in common”
― Julian Barnes, The Only Story

“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

“Everyone has their love story. Everyone. It may have been a fiasco, it may have fizzled out, it may never even have got going, it may have been all in the mind, that doesn't make it any less real. Sometimes, it makes it more real. Sometimes, you see a couple, and they seem bored witless with one another, and you can't imagine them having anything in common, or why they're still living together. But it's not just habit or complacency or convention or anything like that. It's because once, they had their love story. Everyone does. It's the only story.”
― Julian Barnes, The Only Story

“First love fixes a life for ever: this much I have discovered over the years. It may not outrank subsequent loves, but they will always be affected by its existence.”
― Julian Barnes, The Only Story

“Things, once gone, can't be put back; he knew that now. A punch, once delivered, can't be withdrawn. Words, once spoken, can't be unsaid. We may go on as if nothing has been lost, nothing done, nothing said; we may claim to forget it all; but our innermost core doesn't forget, because we have been changed forever.”
― Julian Barnes, The Only Story

“That’s one of the things about life. We’re all just looking for a place of safety. And if you don’t find one, then you have to learn how to pass the time”
― Julian Barnes, The Only Story

“Though sometimes, first love cauterises the heart, and all any searcher will find thereafter is scar tissue.”
― Julian Barnes, The Only Story

“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

“But there is panic and pandemonium waiting to break out inside all of us, of this I am convinced. I’ve seen it roar out among the dying, as a last protest against the human condition and its chronic sadness.”
― Julian Barnes, The Only Story

“Susan had pointed out that everyone has their love story. Even if it was a fiasco, even if it fizzled out, never got going, had all been in the mind to begin with: that didn't make it any the less real. And it was the only story.”
― Julian Barnes, The Only Story

“In love, everything is both true and false; it's the one subject on which it's impossible to say anything absurd.”
― Julian Barnes, The Only Story

“Because once you had been through certain things, their presence inside you never really disappeared.”
― Julian Barnes, The Only Story

“Love means never having to say you’re sorry (on the contrary, it frequently means doing just precisely that).”
― Julian Barnes, The Only Story

“You see—I hope you never get there yourself—but some of us get to the point in life where we realise that nothing matters. Nothing fucking matters.”
― Julian Barnes, The Only Story

“You realize that tough love is also tough on the lover.”
― Julian Barnes, The Only Story

“The cure for sex is marriage; the cure for love is marriage; the cure for infidelity is divorce; the cure for unhappiness is work; the cure for extreme unhappiness is drink; the cure for death is a frail belief in the afterlife.”
― Julian Barnes, The Only Story

“It’s a condition of our mortality. We have codes of manners to allay and minimise it, jokes and routines, and so many forms of diversion and distraction. But there is panic and pandemonium waiting to break out inside all of us, of this I am convinced. I’ve seen it roar out among the dying, as a last protest against the human condition and its chronic sadness. But it is there in the most balanced and rational of us. You just need the right circumstances, and it will surely appear. And then you are at its mercy. The panic takes some to God, others to despair, some to charitable works, others to drink, some to emotional oblivion, others to a life where they hope that nothing serious will ever trouble them again.”
― Julian Barnes, The Only Story

“There were two ways of looking at life;or two extremes of viewpoint, anyway, with a continuum between them. One proposed that every human action necessarily carried with it the obliteration of every other action which might have been performed instead; life therefore consisted of a succession of small and large choices, expressions of free will, so that the individual was like the captain of some paddle steamer chugging down the mighty Mississipi of life. The other proposed that it was all inevitability, that pre-history ruled, that a human life was no more than a bump on a log which was itself being propelled down the mighty Mississipi, tugged and bullied, smacked and weedled, by currents and eddies and hazards over which no control was possible. Paul thought it did not have to be one or the other. He thought a life – his own, of course – could be lived first under the dispensation of inevitability, and later under the dispensation of free will. But he also realized that retrospective reorderings of life are always likely to be self-serving.”
― Julian Barnes, The Only Story

“Work would be something I jogged along with; love would be my life.”
― Julian Barnes, The Only Story

“An English silence—one in which all the unspoken words are perfectly understood by both parties—prevailed. I got into my bed and wept. The matter was never referred to again.”
― Julian Barnes, The Only Story

“And this is how I would remember it all, if I could. But I can’t.”
― Julian Barnes, The Only Story

“He sometimes asked himself a question about life. Which are truer, the happy memories, or the unhappy ones? He decided, eventually, that the question was unanswerable.”
― Julian Barnes, The Only Story

“We're leaving," I told her one July afternoon.

"We? You and I? Where are we going, young Master Paul? Do you have your belongings tied up in a red-spotted handkerchief on a stick?”
― Julian Barnes, The Only Story