Loving humanity means as much, and as little, as loving raindrops, or loving the Milky Way. You say that you love humanity?… — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
“Initially, you continue doing what you used to do with her, out of familiarity, love, the need for a pattern. Soon, you… — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
we must be precise with love, its language and its gestures. If it is to save us, we must look at it… — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
“This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn't turn out to be like Literature. Look at our parents--were they the stuff… — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
“Would you rather love the more, and suffer the more; or love the less, and suffer the less? That is, I think,… — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
“I love you." For a start, we'd better put these words on a high shelf; in a square box behind glass which… — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
“That's the real distinction between people: not between those who have secrets and those who don't, but between those who want to… — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
“He loved his mother: doesn't that warm your silly, sentimental, twentieth-century heart? He loved his father. He loved his sister. He loved… — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
“Next to not living with those one loves, the worst torture is living with those one doesn't love.” — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
“Anyway... she's asleep, turned away from me on her side. The usual stratagems and repositionings have failed to induce narcosis in me,… — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
“poets seem able to turn bad love – selfish, shitty love – into good love poetry. Prose writers lack this power of… — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
People in love, it is well known, suffer extreme conceptual delusions, the most common of these being that other people find your… — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
“For most of us, the first experience of love, even if it doesn’t work out – perhaps especially when it doesn’t work… — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
“When she dies, you are not at first surprised. Part of love is preparing for death. You feel confirmed in your love… — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
“What makes us want to know the worst? Is it that we tire of preferring to know the best? Does curiosity always… — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
Love is just a system for getting someone to call you darling after sex. — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
“- he couldn't believe how falling love with Martha made things simpler. No, that wasn't the right word, unless 'simpler' also included… — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
“You put together two things that have not been put together before. And the world is changed. People may not notice at the time,… — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
“I settled into a contented routine of working, spending my free time with Veronica and, back in my student room, wanking explosively to fantasies… — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
The greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonorably, foolishly, viciously. — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
“There is only good vodka and very good vodka—there is no such thing as bad vodka.” — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
Alice Munro can move characters through time in a way that no other writer can. — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
How rarely do our emotions meet the object they seem to deserve? How hopelessly we signal; how dark the sky; how big the waves.… — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
You put together two people who have not been put together before. Sometimes it is like that first attempt to harness a hydrogen balloon… — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
“Also, when you are young, you think you can predict the likely pains and bleaknesses that age might bring. You imagine yourself being lonely,… — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
“Why slum it where people were burdened by yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that? By history? Here, on the Island,… — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
“In those years before mobile phones, email and Skype, travelers depended on the rudimentary communications system known as the postcard. Other methods--the long-distance phone… — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
“My train was late, slowed by the usual Sunday engineering work. I got home in the early evening. I remember that I had a… — Julian Barnes Copy Share Image
