Top 75 Anita Brookner Quotes
#1. What is interesting about self-analysis is that it leads nowhere - it is an art form in itself.
Anita Brookner
#2. That sun, that light had faded, and she had faded with them. Now she was as grey as the season itself.
Anita Brookner
#3. Writing novels preserves you in a state of innocence - a lot passes you by - simply because your attention is otherwise diverted.
Anita Brookner
#4. To remain pure, a novel has to cast a moral puzzle. Anything else is mere negotiation.
Anita Brookner
#5. One loses the capacity to grieve as a child grieves, or to rage as a child rages: hotly, despairingly, with tears of passion. One grows up, one becomes civilized, one learns one's manners, and consequently can no longer manage these two functions - sorrow and anger - adequately.
Anita Brookner
#6. A man can go from being a lover to being a stranger in three moves flat but a woman under the guise of friendship will engage in acts of duplicity which come to light very much later. There are different species of self-justification.
Anita Brookner
#7. I was brought up among the sort of self-important women who had a husband as one has an alibi.
Anita Brookner
#8. For once a thing is known, it can never be unknown. It can only be forgotten.
Anita Brookner
#9. Literature for me was a magnificent destiny for which I was not yet fully prepared. 76
Anita Brookner
#10. You never know what you will learn till you start writing. Then you discover truths you never knew existed.
Anita Brookner
#11. Like many rich men, he thought in anecdotes; like many simple women, she thought in terms of biography.
Anita Brookner
#12. Good women always think it is their fault when someone else is being offensive. Bad women never take the blame for anything.
Anita Brookner
#13. Fiction, the time-honoured resource of the ill-at-ease, would have to come to her aid,
Anita Brookner
#14. Time misspent in youth is sometimes all the freedom one ever has.
Anita Brookner
#15. The evening passes somehow; I watch television with Nancy, or I write. It is difficult, not having a family, and it is difficult to explain. I always go to bed early. And I am always ready for Monday morning, that time that other people dread.
Anita Brookner
#16. Life ... is not simply a series of exciting new ventures. The future is not always a whole new ball game. There tends to be unfinished business. One trails all sorts of things around with one, things that simply won't be got rid of.
Anita Brookner
#17. I think that those few words were my greatest mistake.
Anita Brookner
#20. People say that I am always serious and depressing, but it seems to me that the English are never serious - they are flippant, complacent, ineffable, but never serious, which is sometimes maddening.
Anita Brookner
#21. It is my contention that Aesop was writing for the tortoise market. hares have no time to read.
Anita Brookner
#22. They had waited for too long, and the result was this hiatus, and the reflection that time and patience may bring poor rewards, that time itself, if not confronted at the appropriate juncture, can play sly tricks, and more significantly, that those who do not act are not infrequently acted upon.
Anita Brookner
#23. The lessons taught in great books are misleading. The commerce in life is rarely so simple and never so just.
Anita Brookner
#24. Hartmann had the ideas and Fibich did the worrying: it suited them both perfectly.
Anita Brookner
#25. Existentialism is about being a saint without God; being your own hero, without all the sanction and support of religion or society.
Anita Brookner
#26. Problems of human behavior still continue to baffle us, but at least in the Library we have them properly filed.
Anita Brookner
#27. I reflected how easy it is for a man to reduce women of a certain age to imbecility. All he has to do is give an impersonation of desire, or better still, of secret knowledge, for a woman to feel herself a source of power.
Anita Brookner
#28. Dr Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature
Anita Brookner
#29. I'm a middle-class, middle-brow novelist. And that's it. It amuses me.
Anita Brookner
#30. Life is a pilgrimage and if you don't play by the rules you don't find the Road to Damascus, you find the Crown of Thorns.
Anita Brookner
#31. Old times, sad times. I feel better about them now than I did then.
Anita Brookner
#32. In real life, of course, it is the hare that wins. Every time. Look around you.
Anita Brookner
#33. We shall none of us ever make love again, she thought, and did not much care. Life had not been too harsh; the sea would still be there at the end. She was nearly ready.
Anita Brookner
#34. Old men should have more care to end life well than to live long.
Anita Brookner
#35. Accountability in friendship is the equivalent of love without strategy.
Anita Brookner
#40. There are moments when you feel free, moments when you have energy, moments when you have hope, but you can't rely on any of these things to see you through. Circumstances do that.
Anita Brookner
#41. And without understanding, could each properly love the other?
Anita Brookner
#42. As a devil's advocate Mr Neville was faultless. And yet, she knew, there was a flaw in his reasoning, just as there was a flaw in his ability to feel.
Anita Brookner
#43. I never learnt Hebrew because my health was fragile, and it was thought that learning Hebrew would be an added burden. I regret it, because I would like to be able to join in fully. Not that I am a believer, but I would like to be.
Anita Brookner
#44. Fiction is the great repository of the moral sense. The wicked get punished.
Anita Brookner
#45. The trouble with good manners is that people are persuaded that you are all right, require no protection, are perfectly capable of looking after yourself.
Anita Brookner
#46. A man of such obvious and exemplary charm must be a liar.
Anita Brookner
#47. When you make a break for freedom you don't necessarily find company on the way.
Anita Brookner
#48. I suppose what one wants really is ideal company and books are ideal company.
Anita Brookner
#49. The essence of romantic love is that wonderful beginning, after which sadness and impossibility may become the rule.
Anita Brookner
#51. In real life, it is the hare who wins. Every time. Look around you. And in any case it is my contention that Aesop was writing for the tortoise market. Hares have no time to read. They are too busy winning the game.
Anita Brookner
#52. A complete woman is probably not a very admirable creature. She is manipulative, uses other people to get her own way, and works within whatever system she is in.
Anita Brookner
#53. Real love is a pilgrimage. It happens when there is no strategy, but it is very rare because most people are strategists
Anita Brookner
#54. [ ... ] as if the next thing must quickly come along to occupy her, or the abyss might open. What abyss? The abyss that waits for all of us, when all our actions seem futile, when the ability to fill the day seems stalled, and the waiting takes on an edge of dread.
Anita Brookner
#55. Boundaries keep people out; mine served only to keep me in.
Anita Brookner
#56. I'm not very popular, because they're bleak and they're mournful and all the rest of it and I get censorious reviews. But I'm only writing fiction. I'm not making munitions, so I think it's acceptable.
Anita Brookner
#57. I was brought up to look after my parents. My family were Polish Jews, and we lived with my grandmother, with uncles and aunts and cousins all around, and I thought everybody lived like that.
Anita Brookner
#58. It will be a pity if women in the more conventional mould are to be phased out, for there will never be anyone to go home to.
Anita Brookner
#60. I think you always feel braver in another language.
Anita Brookner
#61. No blame should attach to telling the truth. But it does, it does.
Anita Brookner
#62. Always let them think of you as singing and dancing.
Anita Brookner
#63. You have no idea how promising the world begins to look once you have decided to have it all for yourself. And how much healthier your decisions are once they become entirely selfish.
Anita Brookner
#64. I reminded myself of someone, but someone I had not seen for a long time.
Anita Brookner
#65. You can never betray the people who are dead, so you go on being a public Jew; the dead can't answer slurs, but I'm here. I would love to think that Jesus wants me for a sunbeam, but he doesn't.
Anita Brookner
#66. Fortunately, common sense asserted itself and I vowed that I should never wait for anyone again.
Anita Brookner
#67. Of course, the spectacle of two people's happiness is always something of a magnet for the unclaimed.
Anita Brookner
#68. Romanticism is not just a mode; it literally eats into every life. Women will never get rid of just waiting for the right man.
Anita Brookner
#69. Women share their sadness, thought Edith. Their joy they like to show off to one another. Victory, triumph over the odds, calls for an audience. And that air of bustle and exigence sometimes affected by the sexually loquacious - that is for the benefit of other women. No solidarity then.
Anita Brookner
#70. I need noise and interruptions and irritation: irritation and discomfort are a great starter. The loneliness of doing it any other way would kill me.
Anita Brookner
#72. All good fortune is a gift of the gods, and you don't win the favor of the ancient gods by being good, but by being bold.
Anita Brookner
#73. If I were happy, married with six children, I wouldn't be writing. And I doubt if I should want to.
Anita Brookner
#74. I was a teacher most of my life, which I loved. I had a very happy working life, and when I retired, I thought I must do something, and I've always read a lot of fiction - you learn so much from fiction. My sentimental education came mostly from fiction, I should say, so I thought I'd try.
Anita Brookner
#75. Satire is dependent on strong beliefs, and on strong beliefs wounded.
Anita Brookner
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