Julian Barnes Love Etc Quotes

#1. ... The other half wanted to say, I love you, come away with me, sit on my knee, I'll always remember you. You so full of your past, me so full of my future. - Author: Julian Barnes

#2. We knew from our reading of great literature that Love involved Suffering, and would happily have got in some practice at Suffering if there was an implicit, perhaps even logical, promise that Love might be on its way. - Author: Julian Barnes

#3. One of the troubles is this: the heart isn't heart-shaped. - Author: Julian Barnes

#4. What makes us want to know the worst? Is it that we tire of preferring to know the best? Does curiosity always hurdle self-interest? Or is it, more simply, that wanting to know the worst is love's favorite perversion. - Author: Julian Barnes

#5. Perhaps love is essential because it's unnecessary. - Author: Julian Barnes

#6. Such was humanity's self-love, Nadar concluded, that most were inevitably disappointed when they finally saw a true image of themselves. - Author: Julian Barnes

#7. With a lover, a wife, when you find the worst - be it infidelity or lack of love, madness or the suicidal spark - you are almost relieved. Life is as I thought it was; shall we now celebrate this disappointment? - Author: Julian Barnes

#8. Oliver used to have a theory he called Love, etc.: in other words the world divides into people for whom love is everything and the rest of life is a mere 'etc.,' and people who don't value love enough and find the most exciting part of life is the 'etc. - Author: Julian Barnes

#9. Next to not living with those one loves, the worst torture is living with those one doesn't love. - Author: Julian Barnes

#10. And that was all the part of it - the way you were obliged to live. You stifled a groan, you lied about your love, you deceived your legal wife, and all in the name of honour. That was the damned paradox of it - in order to behave well, you have to behave badly. - Author: Julian Barnes

#11. A question from the floor: are there tribes whose lexicon lacks the words 'I love you'? Or have they all died out. - Author: Julian Barnes

#12. It would be comforting if love were an energy source which continued to glow after our deaths. - Author: Julian Barnes

#13. Altitude reduces all things to their relative proportions, and to the truth. Cares, remorse, disgust become strangers: How easily indifference, contempt, forgetfulness drop away ... and forgiveness descends. - Author: Julian Barnes

#14. When we fall in love, we hope - both egotistically and altruistically - that we shall be finally, truly seen: judged and approved. Of course, love does not always bring approval: being seen may just as well lead to a thumbs-down and a season in hell. - Author: Julian Barnes

#15. Loving humanity means as much, and as little, as loving raindrops, or loving the Milky Way. You say that you love humanity? Are you sure you aren't treating yourself to easy self-congratulation, seeking approval, making certain you're on the right side? - Author: Julian Barnes

#16. There are two essential kinds of loneliness: that of not having found someone to love, and that of having been deprived of the one you did love. The first kind is worse. Nothing can compare to the loneliness of the soul in adolescence. - Author: Julian Barnes

#17. 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. - Author: Julian Barnes

#18. Every love story is a potential grief story. - Author: Julian Barnes

#19. Old love is a row of beach huts in November. - Author: Julian Barnes

#20. Because love is the meeting point of truth and magic. Truth, as in photography; magic, as in ballooning. - Author: Julian Barnes

#21. There is the question of loneliness. But again, this is not how you imagined it (if you had ever tried to imagine it). There are two essential kinds of loneliness: that of not having found someone to love, and that of having been deprived of the one you did love. The first kind is worse. - Author: Julian Barnes

#22. I loved her; we were happy; I miss her. She didn't love me; we were unhappy; I miss her. - Author: Julian Barnes

#23. Love is just a system for getting someone to call you Darling after sex. - Author: Julian Barnes

#24. Love may not lead where we think or hope, but regardless of outcome it should be a call to seriousness and truth. If it is not that - if it is not moral in its effect - then love is no more than an exaggerated form of pleasure. - Author: Julian Barnes

#25. Paris is certainly one of the most boastful of cities, and you could argue that it has had a lot to boast about: at various times the European centre of power, of civilisation, of the arts, and (self-advertisingly, at least) of love. - Author: Julian Barnes

#26. It seemed to us philosophically self-evident that suicide was every free person's right: a logical act when faced with illness or senility; a heroic one when faced with torture or the avoidable deaths of others; a glamourous one in the fury of dissappointed love (see: Great Literature). - Author: Julian Barnes

#27. We must be precise with love, its language and its gestures. If it is to save us, we must look at it as clearly as we should learn to look at death - Author: Julian Barnes

#28. It had been a slow and painful business, discovering that the theory of love did not match the reality of life. It was like expecting to be able to write a symphony because you had once read a handbook of composition. - Author: Julian Barnes

#29. Love is anti-mechanical, anti-materialist: that's why bad love is still good love. It may make us unhappy, but it insists that the mechanical and the material needn't be in charge - Author: Julian Barnes

#30. People in love, it is well known, suffer extreme conceptual delusions, the most common of these being that other people find your condition as thrilling and eye-watering as you do yourselves. - Author: Julian Barnes

#31. 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. - Author: Julian Barnes