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Time Quotes by Julian Barnes

55 Time quotes by Julian Barnes

All Time quotes Julian Barnes’s page

Putting two things together that have never met can change the world, even if people don’t notice at first. He reflects on time’s paradoxes, saying memory acts as a solvent rather than a fixative, and that time seems to speed up as we age. He also explores how recalling the past can make us blame the present and how despair can lead to suicide thoughts.

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“I can't do anything to you now, but time can. Time will tell. It always does.”

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

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“Is there anything more plausible than a second hand?”

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“The past is something we can neither hold on to nor move entirely beyond.”

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But that’s one advantage of fiction, you can speed up time.

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Alice Munro can move characters through time in a way that no other writer can.

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

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“…in this country shadings of class resist time longer than differentials in age”

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“how weird it would be to have around you only as many books as you have time to read in the rest…

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“You put together two things that have not been put together before. And the world is changed. People may not notice at…

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Grief reconfigures time, its length, its texture, its function: one day means no more than the next, so why have they been…

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“...how time first grounds us and then confounds us…give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.”

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As I've explained to my wife many times, you have to kill your wife or mistress to get on the front page…

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“you find yourself repeating, ‘They grow up so quickly, don’t they?’ when all you really mean is: time goes faster for me…

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It strikes me that this may be one of the differences between youth and age: when we are young, we invent different…

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“But time … how time first grounds us and then confounds us. We thought we were being mature when we were only…

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“I didn't doubt for a moment that she had read them all, or that they were the right books to own. Further,…

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“Who was it said that memory is what we thought we'd forgotten? And it ought to be obvious to us that time…

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“And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us of time's malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others…

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“The time-deniers say: forty's nothing, at fifty you're in your prime, sixty's the new forty, and so on. I know this much:…

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You get towards the end of life - no, not life itself, but of something else: the end of any likelihood of…

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“When we killed – or exiled – God, we also killed ourselves. Did we notice that sufficiently at the time? No God,…

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Paris is certainly one of the most boastful of cities, and you could argue that it has had a lot to boast…

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“Someone once said that his favourite times in history were when things were collapsing, because that meant something new was being born.…

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“Back in 'my day' – though I didn't claim ownership of it at the time, this is what used to happen: you…

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“The past is a distant, receding coastline, and we are all in the same boat. Along the stern rail there is a…

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“Perhaps I just feel safer with the history that’s been more or less agreed upon. Or perhaps it’s that same paradox again:…

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“Mas o tempo… o tempo primeiro fixa-nos e depois confunde-nos. Pensávamos que estávamos a ser adultos quando estávamos só a ser prudentes.…

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“But the moment I realized that Pomiane was not just sympathetic but deeply on my side came in his recipe for Bœuf…

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“Does character develop over time? In novels, of course it does:otherwise there wouldn't be much of a story. But in life? I…

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“For some people, the time differentials established in youth never really disappear: the elder remains the elder, even when both are dribbling…

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“When she dies, you are not at first surprised. Part of love is preparing for death. You feel confirmed in your love…

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“And what percentage of people take up the option to die off?’ She looked at me, her glance telling me to be…

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“I must confess that in all the times I read Madame Bovary, I never noticed the heroine's rainbow eyes. Should I have?…

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“I remember a period in late adolescence when my mind would make itself drunk with images of adventurousness. This is how it…

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“...perhaps the sweetest moment in writing is the arrival of that idea for a book which never has to be written, which…

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“We may choose to freeze a moment and say that it all 'began' then, but as an historian I have to tell…

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I have at times tried to imagine the despair which leads to suicide, attempted to conjure up the slew and slop of…

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“And in these times, people were always in danger of becoming less than fully themselves. If you terrorised them enough, they became…

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“From The Noise of Time: What could be put up against the noise of time? Only that music which is inside ourselves--the…

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More by Julian Barnes

“You put together two things that have not been put together before. And the world is changed. People may not notice at the time,…

“I settled into a contented routine of working, spending my free time with Veronica and, back in my student room, wanking explosively to fantasies…

The greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonorably, foolishly, viciously.

“There is only good vodka and very good vodka—there is no such thing as bad vodka.”

Alice Munro can move characters through time in a way that no other writer can.

How rarely do our emotions meet the object they seem to deserve? How hopelessly we signal; how dark the sky; how big the waves.…

You put together two people who have not been put together before. Sometimes it is like that first attempt to harness a hydrogen balloon…

“Also, when you are young, you think you can predict the likely pains and bleaknesses that age might bring. You imagine yourself being lonely,…

“Why slum it where people were burdened by yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that? By history? Here, on the Island,…

“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…

“My train was late, slowed by the usual Sunday engineering work. I got home in the early evening. I remember that I had a…

In life, every ending is just the start of another story.

“Indeed, isn’t the whole business of ascribing responsibility kind of a cop-out? We want to blame an individual so that everyone else is exculpated.…

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…

“And what percentage of people take up the option to die off?’ She looked at me, her glance telling me to be calm. ‘Oh,…