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Was this their exact exchange? Almost certainly not. Still, it is my best memory of their exchange.

Was this their exact exchange? Almost certainly not. Still, it is my best memory of their exchange.
– Julian Barnes

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  1. History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation. – Julian Barnes
  2. He didn’t really like travel, of course. He liked the idea of travel, and the memory of travel, but not travel itself. – Julian Barnes
  3. But I don’t remember. I won’t remember. Memory is an act of will, and so is forgetting. – Julian Barnes
  4. And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability. – Julian Barnes
  5. Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time. – Julian Barnes
  6. Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? – Julian Barnes
  7. Reading is a majority skill but a minority art. – Julian Barnes
  8. Women scheme when they are weak, they lie out of fear. Men scheme when they are strong, they lie out of arrogance. – Julian Barnes
  9. Pride makes us long for a solution to things -“ a solution, a purpose, a final cause; but the better telescopes become, the more stars appear. – Julian Barnes
  10. Most people, in my opinion, steal much of what they are. If they didn’t what poor items they would be. – Julian Barnes
  11. The greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonorably, foolishly, viciously. – Julian Barnes
  12. The best form of government is one that is dying, because that means it’s giving way to something else. – Julian Barnes
  13. Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time. Art does not exist for art’s sake: it exists for people’s sake. – Julian Barnes
  14. History isn’t what happened, history is just what historians tell us. – Julian Barnes
  15. Music escapes from words: that is its purpose, and its majesty. – Julian Barnes
  16. You can deal with the brain, as I say; it looks sensible, whereas the heart, the human heart, I’m afraid, looks a ????ing mess. – Julian Barnes
  17. Love is just a system for getting someone to call you Darling after sex. – Julian Barnes
  18. you find yourself repeating, -˜They grow up so quickly, don’t they?’ when all you really mean is: time goes faster for me nowadays. – Julian Barnes
  19. What was the point of having a situation worthy of fiction if the protagonist didn’t behave as he would have done in a book? – Julian Barnes
  20. Of course, there were other sorts of literature — theoretical, self-referencial, lachrymosely autobiographical — but they were just dry wanks. – Julian Barnes
  21. There is a grotesquerie to grief as well. You lose the sense of your existence being rational, or justifiable. You feel absurd. – Julian Barnes
  22. Throw off your grief,’ doubters imply, ‘and we can all go back to pretending death doesn’t exist, or at least is comfortably far away. – Julian Barnes
  23. The final tormenting, unanswerable question: what is ‘success’ in mourning? – Julian Barnes
  24. What you end up remembering isn’t always the same as what you have witnessed. – Julian Barnes
  25. …I need to return briefly to a few incidents that have grown into anecdotes, to some approximate memories which time has deformed into certainty. – Julian Barnes
  26. wear flannel next to your skin, and never believe in eternal punishment. – Julian Barnes
  27. Opera cuts to the chase-”as death does. An art which seeks, more obviously than any other form, to break your heart. – Julian Barnes
  28. May you be ordinary, as the poet once wished the new-born baby. – Julian Barnes
  29. The mechanism of natural selection depends on the survival, not of the strongest, nor the most intelligent, but of the most adaptable. – Julian Barnes
  30. But life never lets you go, does it? You can’t put down life the way you put down a book. – Julian Barnes
  31. Memories of childhood were the dreams that stayed with you after you woke. – Julian Barnes
  32. Games are for childhood, and sometimes I think I lost my childhood young. – Julian Barnes
  33. There is violence in this supposedly tender heart of mine. – Julian Barnes
  34. ..books look as if they contain knowledge, while e-readers look as if they contain information. – Julian Barnes
  35. I thought of the things that had happened to me over the years, and of how little I had made happen. – Julian Barnes
  36. … forty’s nothing, at fifty you’re in your prime, sixty’s the new forty, and so on. – Julian Barnes
  37. I don’t ever want to get old. Spare me that. Have you the power? No, even you don’t have the power, alas. – Julian Barnes
  38. If you turned your back on irony, it curdled into sarcasm. And what good was it then? Sarcasm was irony which had lost its soul. – Julian Barnes
  39. Irony – The modern mode: either the devil’s mark or the snorkel of sanity. – Julian Barnes
  40. Time…give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical. – Julian Barnes

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