Top 100 Barnes Quotes
#1. I had wanted life not to bother me too much, and had succeeded - and how pitiful that was.
Julian Barnes
#2. People who shop at Barnes and Noble voted Ulysses the best novel of the last century, and who's to tell them different? There was a point when I would have liked to, but apparently that's just because I'm a bitch.
Dale Peck
#3. Again, I must stress that this is my reading now of what happened then. Or rather, my memory now of my reading then of what was happening at the time.
Julian Barnes
#4. One cup poured into another makes different waters; tears shed by one eye would blind if wept into another's eye. The breast we strike in joy is not the breast we strike in pain; any man's smile would be consternation on another's mouth.
Djuna Barnes
#5. Well, they each seem to do one thing well enough, but fail to realize that literature depends on doing several things well at the same time.
Julian Barnes
#6. But if you're very clever, I think there's something that can unhinge you if you're not careful.
Julian Barnes
#7. This was our language: half-truths, obvious lies, accusations neither one of us would ever make. It was a system eery bit as complicated as Morse code or the dancing of bees. Don't ask, don't tell, stay civil.
Jennifer Lynn Barnes
#8. For most people, life is nasty, brutish, and short; for me, it has simply been nasty and brutish.
Djuna Barnes
#9. Ronald Reagan has a story for every occasion. Bill Clinton has an excuse for every occasion.
Fred Barnes
#10. The comfort zone is always the most desirable place to be. But in settling for comfort, there is a price to pay and it comes in the death of ambition, of hope, of youth and the death of self.
Simon Barnes
#11. The complications of life do not end at the altar; some might say that this is where they begin.
Julian Barnes
#12. Women were brought up to believe that men were the answer. They weren't. They weren't even one of the questions.
Julian Barnes
#14. How rarely do our emotions meet the object they seem to deserve? How hopelessly we signal; how dark the sky; how big the waves. We are all lost at sea, washed between hope and despair, hailing something that may never come to rescue us.
Julian Barnes
#15. Making my way out of the bedroom, I found the loft empty, a visceral reminder that it had always been my sister's choice not to know me.
Jennifer Lynn Barnes
#16. There is accumulation. There is responsibility. And beyond this there is great unrest.
Julian Barnes
#17. I dressed up like a crazy pharaoh for you, man!
Troy Barnes
#18. It is all just the universe doing its stuff, and we are the stuff it is being done to.
Julian Barnes
#19. I am married,' she shouted, 'to the cupboard under the sink.' A remark made more mysterious to Mrs Barnes by the sound of a passing ice-cream van playing the opening bars of the 'Blue Danube'.
Alan Bennett
#20. Nobody says these things - it's against the rules - but deep inside we know that we are, each of us, unknowable and ultimately alone, even when we love. Most
Adrian Barnes
#21. Take a little time to make ordinary things extraordinary.
Emilie Barnes
#22. A mass of dust, world's momentary slave, Is man, in state of our old Adam made, Soon born to die, soon flourishing to fade.
Barnabe Barnes
#23. The traditional dress of the Australian cricketer is the baggy green cap on the head and the chip on the shoulder. Both are ritualistically assumed
Simon Barnes
#24. You know, when someone hurts my feelings, somehow it does not comfort me to know that it was deliberate ... On the other hand, knowing that someone else thinks they are assholes helps a great deal."
"I think that's some kind of rule for the universe.
John Barnes
#25. We went to Mexico, had some tequlia, eloped with a pair of drug smugglers, and took part-time jobs as exotic dancers. You know, same old, same old.
Jennifer Lynn Barnes
#26. I am comfortable playing the fool, I think.
Ben Barnes
#27. Is that your professional take on the situation? I kept my voice dry and caustic. This wasn't worth yelling over. It wasn't even worth a heated whisper.
Jennifer Lynn Barnes
#29. I didn't have any pets growing up.
Ben Barnes
#30. It is only by such extreme measures that the average man can remember something long ago; truly, not that he remembers, but that crime itself is the door to an accumulation, a way to lay hands on the shudder of a past that is still vibrating.
Djuna Barnes
#31. For most of us, the first experience of love, even if it doesn't work out-perhaps especially when it doesn't work out-promises that here is the thing that validates, that vindicates life.
Julian Barnes
#33. Benji grinned back. "You're being a real asshole today, Mr. Barnes. Well done - you been practicing?" Dad smiled, obviously relaxed. "Yeah, you know, kid, a few minutes a day, you can work that muscle with the best of them.
Amy Lane
#34. One thing I learned a long time ago as a prosecutor is that it's tough to get people to obey a law if there is not penalty for breaking it.
Roy Barnes
#35. Asher smiled beatifically, as if he'd been waiting his whole life for someone to ask just that question. How would you feel about some Mentos and Diet Coke?
Jennifer Lynn Barnes
#36. Iconic Paris tells us: here are our three-star attractions, go thou and marvel. And so we gaze obediently at what we are told to gaze at, without exactly asking why.
Julian Barnes
#37. The Philadelphia Museum of Art is a house of artistic and intellectual prostitution
Albert C. Barnes
#39. Life is not to be told, call it as loud as you like, it will not tell itself.
Djuna Barnes
#40. Television is the first truly democratic culture - the first culture available to everybody and entirely governed by what the people want. The most terrifying thing is what people do want.
Clive Barnes
#41. After a number of events, what is there left but repetition and diminishment? Who wants to go on living? The eccentric, the religious, the artistic (sometimes); those with a false sense of their own worth. Soft cheeses collapse; firm cheeses indurate. Both go mouldy.
Julian Barnes
#42. A strong sense of identity gives man an idea he can do no wrong; too little accomplishes the same.
Djuna Barnes
#43. The trouble with education is that we always read everything when we're too young to know what it means. And the trouble with life is that we're always too busy to re-read it later.
Margaret Ayer Barnes
#44. I don't like running away," Michael; brought his eyes from the floor to mine. "I don't run, I don't hide, I don't cower, I don't beg, Cassie, because running and hiding and begging doesn't work. It never works.
Jennifer Lynn Barnes
#45. I had to protect him. And me. So I took everything I felt for the pack. I saw the bond, and instead of closing myself off to it, I pulled. I pulled at it and I thrust it toward Chase.
Jennifer Lynn Barnes
#46. Posterity will jump to conclusions: that is its nature.
Julian Barnes
#47. That's the thing, when you play younger characters they're always less casual. You're hungrier or more naive. Those things wane in time.
Ben Barnes
#48. Man is the only thing that has no further use after something goes amiss.
Djuna Barnes
#50. In Britain I'm sometimes regarded as a suspiciously Europeanized writer, who has this rather dubious French influence.
Julian Barnes
#51. In the spirit of Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot and Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life, Mr. Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage keeps circling its subject in widening loops and then darting at it when you least expect it ... a wild book.
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt
#52. Did you follow me here?" I asked.
Lake shrugged. "The word follow seems to suggest you got here first.
Jennifer Lynn Barnes
#53. We're not responsible for the bustling and hustling that may go on here. Lots of people bustle, and some hustle. But that's their business, and a very old one.
Pancho Barnes
#54. I want a more difficult life, that's all. What I really want is a first-rate life. I may not get it, but the only chance I have lies in getting out of a second-rate life. I may fail completely, but I do want to try. It's to do with me, not you; so don't worry.
Julian Barnes
#55. Blame someone else, that's always your first instinct. And if you can't blame someone else, then start claiming the problem isn't a problem anyway. Rewrite the rules, shift the goalposts.
Julian Barnes
#56. Khrennikov had an average ear for music, but perfect pitch when it came to power.
Julian Barnes
#58. There's nothing in all the world as much fun as talk. When you're talking, that is, with the right person.
Margaret Ayer Barnes
#59. Living with and studying good paintings offers greater interest, variety and satisfaction than any other pleasure known to man.
Albert C. Barnes
#61. The notion of redefining the deity into something that works for you is grotesque.
Julian Barnes
#62. there's something wrong with any art that makes a woman all bust
Djuna Barnes
#63. Those little age differentials, so crucial and so gross when we are young, erode. We end up belonging to the same category, that of the non-young. I've never much minded this myself. [p. 66]
Julian Barnes
#65. And we weren't a species interested in facts, as such. We were more into evading or spinning them.
Adrian Barnes
#66. Her ambitions were no longer specifically for happiness or financial security or freedom from disease (thought they included all three), but for something more general: the continuing certainty of things. She needed to know that she would carry on being herself.
Julian Barnes
#67. I cannot explain what's between us, Lady Newbury, other than to say that I have an uncanny urge to kiss you whenever we meet.
Sophie Barnes
#68. Adrian, however, pushed us to believe in the application of thought to life, in the notion
Julian Barnes
#69. New York is the meeting place of the peoples, the only city where you can hardly find a typical American.
Djuna Barnes
#70. Neither political party is clean when it comes to tactics that divide our people.
Roy Barnes
#71. I am not a critic; to me criticism is so often nothing more than the eye garrulously denouncing the shape of the peephole that gives access to hidden treasure.
Djuna Barnes
#72. Start with the notion that yours is the sole responsibility unless there's powerful evidence to the contrary
Julian Barnes
#73. We've got activists all across the country like the members of the Million Mom March organization, some of their leaders are here tonight. We're phone banking congressional offices and pursuing editorial boards.
Michael D. Barnes
#74. Had my life increased, or merely added to itself? There had been addition and subtraction in my life, but how much multiplication?
Julian Barnes
#75. Already she was learning that you must not follow a boy around when he had other things on his mind. If you did, he might get tired of being with you. You must just wait and be ready when he did want you.
Nancy Barnes
#76. Our bones ache only while the flesh is on them.
Djuna Barnes
#77. It wasn't that funny, but I laughed. There wouldn't be much laughter in the world if people didn't like each other, because there sure as shit aren't that many good jokes.
John Barnes
#78. Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time.
Julian Barnes
#79. Nobody stops to think about the world anymore. We live in a world where they make
children pay to see the fish eat. Nowadays even fish are exploited, she thought. Exploited, and then poisoned. The ocean out there is filling up with poison. The fish will die too
Julian Barnes
#80. After all, it is not where one washes one's neck that counts but where one moistens one's throat.
Djuna Barnes
#81. 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 where we found the other person, and find them still.
Julian Barnes
#82. From Tattoo- Push-up Bra Barbie over there wanted to smack you around a little to wake you up
Jennifer Lynn Barnes
#84. It is doubtful if a more extensive anthology of errors (William Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich) concerning the personality and policies of Hitler and the causes and responsibility for the Second World War has ever been assembled, even in war time.
Harry Elmer Barnes
#85. I was doing well enough until you came along and kicked my stone over, and out I came, all moss and eyes.
Djuna Barnes
#86. Film-makers and actors can only show a version of the act, but writers can express what people are thinking, feeling, as well as doing.
Julian Barnes
#88. She was gracious and yet fading, like an old statue in a garden, that symbolizes the weather through which it has endured, and is not so much the work of man as the work of wind and rain and the herd of the seasons, and though formed in men's image is a figure of doom.
Djuna Barnes
#89. When you are in your twenties, if even if you're confused and uncertain about your aims and purposes, you have a strong sense of what life itself is, and of what you in life are, and might become.
Julian Barnes
#90. Sterling turned to Michael. I expected her to ask him something, but instead she just held out her hand. "Keys."
"Spatula," Michael replied. She narrowed her eyes at him. "We aren't just saying random nouns?" he asked archly.
Jennifer Lynn Barnes
#91. I wasn't entirely sure how to reply. Blow me and Screw you both seemed like strong contenders, but the peanut gallery in my head appeared to be favoring castration.
Jennifer Lynn Barnes
#92. I'm not surprised some people prefer books. Books make sense of life. The only problem is that the lives they make sense of are other people's lives, never your own.
Julian Barnes
#93. Billy Barnes signed me and got me my first role in an interracial love story filmed in Atlanta called 'Together For Days' with Clifton Davis. My mother thinks it was my best work. You cannot find a copy of it.
Lois Chiles
#94. Life was the cat that dragged the parrot downstairs by its tail; his head banged against every step.
Julian Barnes
#95. The very condition of Woman is so subject to Hazard, so complex, and so grievous, that to place her at one moment is but to displace her at the next.
Djuna Barnes
#96. To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness - though if stupidity is lacking, the others are useless.
Julian Barnes
#97. He didn't really like travel, of course. He liked the idea of travel, and the memory of travel, but not travel itself.
Julian Barnes
#98. Every relationship contains within it the ghosts, or the shadows, of all the other relationships it isn't. All the abandoned alternatives, the forgotten choices, the lives you could have led but didn't and haven't.
Julian Barnes
#99. For a few seconds, I thought I might actually cry. That was so unlike me, I wasn't sure how to respond. Bronwyn Alessia St. Vincent Clare didn't get sad. She got mad. Or better, she got even.
Jennifer Lynn Barnes
#100. Future Farmers of America. Group who take ag classes and are going to inherit the farm. Hot shit around here, they have a couple guys in every clique, and they stick together, 'cause they know they'll be seeing each other every week for the next sixty years.
John Barnes