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England, England
Julian Barnes
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Memories of childhood were the dreams that stayed with you after you woke.”
“Was it the case that colours dimmed as the eye grew elderly? Or was it rather that in youth your excitement about the world transferred itself onto everything you saw and made it brighter?”
“Most people, in my opinion, steal much of what they are. If they didn't what poor items they would be.”
“If a memory wasn't a thing but a memory of a memory of a memory, mirrors set in parallel, then what the brain told you now about what it claimed had happened then would be coloured by what had happened in between. It was like a country remembering its history: the past was never just the past, it was what made the present able to live with itself.”
“And perhaps it was also the case that, for all a lifetime's internal struggling, you were finally no more than what others saw you as. That was your nature, whether you liked it or not.”
“It is important to understand that in the modern world we prefer the replica to the original because it gives us the greater frisson. I leave that word in French because I think you understand it well that way.”
“Martha was a clever girl, and therefore not a believer.”
“An element of propaganda, of sales and marketing, always intervened between the inner and the outer person.”
“- he couldn't believe how falling love with Martha made things simpler. No, that wasn't the right word, unless 'simpler' also included the sense of richer, denser, more complicated, with focus and echo. Half his brain pulsed with gawping incredulity at his luck; the other half was filled with a sense of long-sought, flaming reality. That was the word: falling in love with Martha made things real.”
“Why slum it where people were burdened by yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that? By history? Here, on the Island, they had learnt how to deal with history, how to sling it carelessly on your back and stride out across the download with the breeze in your face.”
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Book Keywords:
excitement, childhood, past, islands, stealing, colour, youth, childhood-memories, history, perspective, human-nature, life, personality, people, the-past, age, memory, ageing