Anita Brookner Quotes

35 Sourced Quotes

Writing novels preserves you in a state of innocence — a lot passes you by — simply because your attention is otherwise diverted.

Anita Brookner
The essence of romantic love is that wonderful beginning, after which sadness and impossibility may become the rule.

Anita Brookner
Time misspent in youth is sometimes all the freedom one ever has.

Anita Brookner
The lessons taught in great books are misleading. The commerce in life is rarely so simple and never so just.

Anita Brookner
A complete woman is probably not a very admirable creature. She is manipulative, uses other people to get her own way, and works within whatever system she is in.

Anita Brookner
Real love is a pilgrimage. It happens when there is no strategy, but it is very rare because most people are strategists.

Anita Brookner
It will be a pity if women in the more conventional mould are to be phased out, for there will never be anyone to go home to.

Anita Brookner
In the street the rain was little more than a fine mist which softened the outlines of the houses and even lent a touch of poetry to a neighbourhood unlikely to evoke tender emotions. He raised his eyes to a roofline bristling with television aerials, lowered them again to windows still blank before the evening lights were lit.

Anita Brookner
All good fortune is a gift of the gods, and... you don't win the favors of the ancient gods by being good, but by being bold.

Anita Brookner
They were privileged children…they would always expect to be greeted with smiles.

Anita Brookner
And without understanding, could each properly love the other?

Anita Brookner
Dr Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature.

Anita Brookner
Literature for me was a magnificent destiny for which I was not yet fully prepared.

Anita Brookner
What is interesting about self-analysis is that it leads nowhere. It is an art form in itself.

Anita Brookner
Problems of human behavior still continue to baffle us, but at least in the Library we have them properly filed.

Anita Brookner
In real life, of course, it is the hare who wins. Every time. Look around you. And in any case it is my contention that Aesop was writing for the tortoise market.... Hares have no time to read. They are too busy winning the game.

Anita Brookner
I have reached the age when a woman begins to perceive that she is growing into the person she least plans to resemble: her mother.

Anita Brookner
That sun, that light had faded, and she had faded with them. Now she was as grey as the season itself.

Anita Brookner
I am not a romantic. I am a domestic animal. I do not sigh and yearn for extravagant displays of passion, for the grand affair, the world well lost for love. I know all that, and know that it leaves you lonely. No, what I crave is the simplicity of routine. An evening walk, arm in arm, in fine weather. A game of cards. Time for idle talk. Preparing a meal together.

Anita Brookner
The evening passes somehow; I watch television with Nancy, or I write. It is difficult, not having a family, and it is difficult to explain. I always go to bed early. And I am always ready for Monday morning, that time that other people dread.

Anita Brookner
Satire is dependent on strong beliefs, and on strong beliefs wounded.

Anita Brookner
Women have come a long way, of course: we can all be left alone at night now. But sometimes it seems a high price to pay. We can also open the door cheerfully to strangers at any hour, deal with obscene telephone calls and mend fuses.

Anita Brookner
It was, I saw, a flat to get out of rather than one to stay in. It was a machine for eating and sleeping in, a suitable dwelling place for a working woman, whose main interest is in her work. I disliked this version of myself, which seemed to negate my other activities, reduced them to after-hours amusements, whereas I had always thought them pretty central. These mute, white walls had been silent witnesses to many encounters; nevertheless, they withheld comment, and their very withholding struck me as unfriendly. Unheimlich was the word which came to mind when I stood on the threshold of my bedroom.

Anita Brookner
Fiction is the great repository of the moral sense. The wicked get punished.

Anita Brookner
Like many rich men, he thought in anecdotes; like many simple women, she thought in terms of biography.

Anita Brookner
I saw the business of writing for what it truly was and is to me. It is your penance for not being lucky. It is an attempt to reach others and to make them love you. It is your instinctive protest, when you find you have no voice at the world's tribunals, and that no one will speak for you. I would give my entire output of words, past, present, and to come, in exchange for easier access to the world, for permission to state "I hurt" or "I hate" or "I want." Or, indeed, "Look at me." And I do not go back on this. For once a thing is known it can never be unknown. It can only be forgotten. And writing is the enemy of forgetfulness, of thoughtlessness. For the writer there is no oblivion. Only endless memory.

Anita Brookner
She was a handsome woman of forty-five and would remain so for many years.

Anita Brookner
And yet she had never felt so bereft, as if her presence in other lives were entirely illusory, as if she herself were a kind of facsimile, pleasant but inauthentic. Before she got too old she must wrest some part of her life for herself, or she would fade, vanish, before anyone noticed her disappearance

Anita Brookner
The house - a substantial but essentially modest suburban villa - was furnished with voluptuous grandeur in approximations of various styles, predominantly those of several Louis, with late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century additions. Heavy coloured glass ashtrays of monstrous size and weight rested in inlaid marquetry tables of vaguely Pompadour associations. At dinner we drank champagne from ruby Bohemian glasses: the meat was carved at a Boulle-type sideboard. 'Regency' wallpaper of dark green and lighter green stripes was partially covered by gilt-framed landscapes of no style whatsoever.'

Anita Brookner
You have no idea how promising the world begins to look once you have decided to have it all for yourself. And how much healthier your decisions are once they become entirely selfish.

Anita Brookner