A Quote by Julian Barnes

Is despair wrong? Isn’t it the natural condition of life after a certain age? … After a number of events, what is there left but repetition and diminishment? Who wants to go on living? The eccentric, the religious, the artistic (sometimes); those with a false sense of their own worth. Soft cheeses collapse; firm cheeses endurate. Both go mouldy.
We, after a certain age, after college, are so consumed about what we want to achieve in life, and we fiercely are ambitious and we go after that, but sometimes we tend to take all our loved and dear ones for granted.
Being a homicide detective ca be the loneliest job in the world. The friends of the victim are upset and in despair, but sooner or later - after weeks or months - they go back to their everyday lives. For the closest family it takes longer, but for the most part, to some degree, they too get over the grieving and despair. Life has to go on; it does go on. But the unsolved murders keep gnawing away and in the end there's only one person left who thinks night and day about the victim: it's the office who is left with the investigation.
Virginity is now a mere preamble or waiting room to be got out of as soon as possible; it is without significance. Old age is similarly a waiting room, where you go after life's over and wait for cancer or a stroke. The years before and after the menstrual years are vestigial: the only meaningful condition left to women is that of fruitfulness.
Cobnuts have a fresher flavour than any other nut I know of and go very well with autumnal fruit and light cheeses.
I'm gonna drop fitty. I'm gonna drop fitty pounds. How many quarter-pounders with cheeses is that? I'm gonna drop 200 quarter-pounder with cheeses.
Habits begin to form at the very first repetition. After that there is a tropism toward repetition, for the patterns involved are defenses , bulwarks against time and despair.
We buy things. We wear them or put them on our walls, or sit on them, but anyone who wants to can take them away from us. Or break them. ... Long after he's dead, someone else will own those stupid little boxes, and then someone after him, just as someone owned them before he did. But no one ever thinks of that: objects survive us and go on living. It's stupid to believe we own them. And it's sinful for them to be so important.
If I do not know reality, the unknown, how can I search for it? Surely it must come but I cannot go after it. If I go after it I am going after something which is the known, projected by me; by my own mind.
We looked at the customer segment that we want to go after, the Millennials, which everybody wants to go after. They are not buying linear TV.
Sometimes it's good just to be seduced by the particular cheeses spread out in front of you on a cheese counter.
Oh, we are but soft and squishy bags of mortality rolling in a bin of sharp circumstance, leaking life until we collapse, flaccid, into our own despair.
What we grieve for is not the loss of a grand vision, but rather the loss of common things, events and gestures.... ordinariness is the most precious thing we struggle for, what the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto fought for. Not noble causes or abstract theories. But the right to go on living with a sense of purpose and a sense of self-worth--an ordinary life.
After school, I started living on my own. After my dad passed away, I didn't know where to go and eventually decided to hang on here in Hyderabad.
I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times, in life after life, in age after age forever. He who wants to do good, knocks at the gate; He who loves, finds the door open.
Out of date, perhaps, but who wasn't these days? Out of date, but loyal to his own time. At a certain moment, after all, every man chooses: will he go forward, will he go back? There was nothing dishounorable in not being blown about by every little modern wind. Better to have worth, to entrench, to be an oak of one's own generation.
That's when I realized that certain moments go on forever. Even after they're over they still go on, even after you're dead and buried, those moments are lasting still, backward and forward, on into infinity. They are everything and everywhere all at once. They are the meaning.
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