"We live on the flat, on the level,……" — Julian Barnes
"We live on the flat, on the level, and yet - and so - we aspire. Groundlings, we can sometimes reach as far as the gods. Some soar with art, others with religion; most with love. But when we soar, we can also crash. There are few soft landings. We may find ourselves bouncing across the ground with leg-fracting force, dragged towards some foreign railway line. Every love story is a potential grief story. If not at first, then later. If not for one, then for the other. Sometimes, for both."
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Julian Barnes
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184 Quotes by Julian Barnes
Julian Barnes has 184 quotes on this site.
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The land of embarrassment and breakfast.
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What is taken away is greater than the sum of what was there. This may not be mathematically possible; but…
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When you read a great book, you don't escape from life, you plunge deeper into it.
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Irony ... may be defined as what people miss.
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Global warming is more of a blessing than a curse.
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When we fall in love, we hope - both egotistically and altruistically - that we shall be finally, truly seen:…
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Perhaps the world progresses not by maturing, but by being in a permanent state of adolescence, of thrilled discovery.
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This is what those who haven’t crossed the tropic of grief often fail to understand: the fact that someone is…
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You put together two people who have not been put together before; and sometimes the world is changed, sometimes not.…
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There is a German word, Sehnsucht, which has no English equivalent; it means 'the longing for something'. It has Romantic…
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Why should anything happen when everything has happened?
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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…
See all 184 quotes by Julian Barnes »
More Across Quotes
This quote is filed under Across Quotes,
one of 3,257 quotes in that category. Here are a few more:
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Genres aren't closed boxes. Stuff flows back and forth across the borders all the time.
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Emigration, forced or chosen, across national frontiers or from village to metropolis, is the quintessential experience of our time.
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The arms race is worse than it ever was, the dumping of creation down a military rat hole is worse…
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Philately is normally a boys' hobby but for some reason it was in vogue at my junior school. Between the…
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If across the Atlantic the ideology was pride, here it is delivering the goods.
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