Julian Barnes, The Sense Of An Ending Quotes
History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.
Some of the freckles I once loved are now closer to liver spots. But it’s still the eyes we look at, isn’t it? That’s where we found the other person, and find them still.
Later on in life, you expect a bit of rest, don't you? You think you deserve it. I did, anyway. But then you begin to understand that the reward of merit is not life's business.
Time...give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.
What you end up remembering isn't always the same as what you have witnessed.
And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability.
I thought of the things that had happened to me over the years, and of how little I had made happen.
May you be ordinary, as the poet once wished the new-born baby.
Was this their exact exchange? Almost certainly not. Still, it is my best memory of their exchange.
...I need to return briefly to a few incidents that have grown into anecdotes, to some approximate memories which time has deformed into certainty.
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.
When you are in your twenties, if 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.
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?
... forty's nothing, at fifty you're in your prime, sixty's the new forty, and so on.
you find yourself repeating, ‘They grow up so quickly, don’t they?’ when all you really mean is: time goes faster for me nowadays.
You may say, But wasn't this the Sixties? Yes, but only for some people, only in certain parts of the country.
