Julian Barnes - The Sense of an Ending (2011)

31 Sourced Quotes

View all Julian Barnes Quotes
History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.

Julian Barnes
I hate the way the English have of not being serious about being serious, I really hate it.

Julian Barnes
We live in time, it bounds us and defines us, and time is supposed to measure history, isn't it? But if we can't understand time, can't grasp its mysteries of pace and progress, what chance do we have with history--even our own small, personal, largely undocumented piece of it?

Julian Barnes
Time...give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.

Julian Barnes
When we're young, everyone over the age of thirty looks middle-aged, everyone over fifty antique. And time, as it goes by, confirms that we weren't that wrong. Those little age differentials, so crucial and so gross when we are young erode. We end up all belonging to the same category, that of the non-young. I've never much minded this myself.

Julian Barnes
This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn't turn out to be like Literature.

Julian Barnes
I remember laughing with relief that the same old adolescent boredom goes on from generation to generation....the words took me back to my own years of stagnancy, and that terrible waiting for life to begin.

Julian Barnes
I know this much: that there is objective time, but also subjective time, the kind you wear on the inside of your wrist, next to where the pulse lies. And this personal time, which is the true time, is measured in your relationship to memory.

Julian Barnes
God knows you can have complication and difficulty without any compensating depth or seriousness

Julian Barnes
How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but — mainly — to ourselves.

Julian Barnes
In those days, we imagined ourselves as being kept in some kind of holding pen, waiting to be released into our lives. And when the moment came, our lives — and time itself — would speed up. How were we to know that our lives had in any case begun, that some advantage had already been gained, some damage already inflicted? Also, that our release would only be into a larger holding pen, whose boundaries would be at first undiscernible.

Julian Barnes
If you're that clever you can argue yourself into anything.

Julian Barnes
He had a better mind and a more rigorous temperament than me; he thought logically, and then acted on the conclusion of logical thought. Whereas most of us, I suspect, do the opposite: we make an instinctive decision, then build up an infrastructure of reasoning to justify it. And call the result common sense.

Julian Barnes
We live with such easy assumptions, don't we? For instance, that memory equals events plus time. But it's all much odder than this. Who was it said that memory is what we thought we'd forgotten? And it ought to be obvious to us that time doesn't act as a fixative, rather as a solvent. But it's not convenient— it's not useful— to believe this; it doesn't help us get on with our lives; so we ignore it.

Julian Barnes
Start with the notion that yours is the sole responsibility unless there's powerful evidence to the contrary

Julian Barnes
May you be ordinary, as the poet once wished the new-born baby.

Julian Barnes
Whisky, I find, helps clarity of thought. And reduces pain. It has the additional virtue of making you drunk or, if taken in sufficient quantity, very drunk.

Julian Barnes
It strikes me that this may be one of the differences between youth and age: when we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old, we invent different pasts for others.

Julian Barnes
There's nothing wrong with being a genius who can fascinate the young. Rather, there's something wrong with the young who can't be fascinated by a genius.

Julian Barnes
And that's a life, isn't it? Some achievements and some disappointments. It's been interesting to me, though I wouldn't complain or be amazed if others found it less so. Maybe, in a way, Adrian knew what he was doing. Not that I would have missed my own life for anything, you understand.

Julian Barnes
I thought of the things that had happened to me over the years, and of how little I had made happen.

Julian Barnes
The more you learn, the less you fear. "Learn" not in the sense of academic study, but in the practical understanding of life.

Julian Barnes
But then you begin to understand that the reward of merit is not life's business.

Julian Barnes
That's one of the central problems of history, isn't it, sir? The question of subjective versus objective interpretation, the fact that we need to know the history of the historian in order to understand the version that is being put in front of us.

Julian Barnes
The next day, when I was sober, I thought again about the three of us, and about time's many paradoxes. For instance: that when we are young and sensitive, we are also at our most hurtful; whereas when the blood begins to slow, when we feel less sharply, when we are more armoured and have learnt how to bear hurt, we tread more carefully.

Julian Barnes
And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time's malleability.

Julian Barnes
What you end up remembering isn't always the same as what you have witnessed.

Julian Barnes
We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but were only being cowardly. What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things rather than facing them.

Julian Barnes
When you are in your twenties, even if you're confused and uncertain about your aims and purposes, you have a strong sense of what life itself is, and of what you in life are, and might become. Later.. later there is more uncertainty, more overlapping, more backtracking, more false memories. Back then, you can remember your short life in its entirety. Later, the memory becomes a thing of shreds and patches.

Julian Barnes
Life is a gift bestowed without anyone asking for it; that the thinking person has a philosophical duty to examine both the nature of life and the conditions it comes with; and that if this person decides to renounce the gift no one asks for, it is the moral and human duty to act on the consequences of that decision.

Julian Barnes