“ No, I was an odder old fool, grafting pathetic hopes of affection onto the least likely recipient in the world. Julian Barnes
“ Still, as I tend to repeat, I have some instinct for survival, for self-preservation. And believing you have such an instinct is almost as good as actually having it, because it means you act in the s… Julian Barnes
“ My younger self had come back to shock my older self with what that self had been, or was, or was sometimes capable of being. And only recently I’d been going on about how the witnesses to our lives d… Julian Barnes
“ You might even ask me to apply my 'theory' to myself and explain what damage I had suffered a long way back and what its consequences might be: for instance, how it might affect my reliability and tru… Julian Barnes
“ I thought—at some level of my being, I actually thought—that I could go back to the beginning and change things. That I could make the blood flow backwards. I had the vanity to imagine—even if I didn'… Julian Barnes
“ I replayed the words that would forever haunt me. As would Adrian's unfinished sentence: 'So, for instance, if Tony . . .' I knew I couldn't change, or mend, anything now. Julian Barnes
“ And so, for the first time, I began to feel a more general remorse—a feeling somewhere between self-pity and self-hatred—about my whole life. Julian Barnes
“ The verdict of the coroner's inquest had been that Adrian Finn (22) had killed himself 'while the balance of his mind was disturbed.' I remember how angry that conventional phrase made me: I would hav… Julian Barnes
“ The answers hardly seemed of consequence. Not much did. I thought of the things that had happened to me over the years, and of how little I had made happen. Julian Barnes
“ But the very action of naming something that subsequently happens—of wishing specific evil, and that evil coming to pass—this still has a shiver of the otherworldly about it. Julian Barnes
“ When you're young—when I was young—you want your emotions to be like the ones you read about in books. You want them to overturn your life, create and define a new reality. Julian Barnes
“ He felt life more clearly too—even, perhaps especially, when he came to decide that it wasn't worth the candle. Julian Barnes
“ That next week was one of the loneliest of my life. There seemed nothing left to look forward to. Julian Barnes
“ But if nostalgia means the powerful recollection of strong emotions—and a regret that such feelings are no longer present in our lives—then I plead guilty . . . And if we're talking about strong feeli… Julian Barnes
“ If Tony hadn't been fearful, hadn't counted on the approval of others for his own self-approval . . . and so on, through a succession of hypotheticals leading to the final one: so, for instance, if To… Julian Barnes
“ This last isn't something I actually saw, but what you end up remembering isn't always the same as what you have witnessed. Julian Barnes
“ Does character develop over time? In novels, of course it does:otherwise there wouldn't be much of a story. But in life? I sometimes wonder. Our attitudes and opinions change we develop new habits and… Julian Barnes
“ Back in 'my day'—though I didn't claim ownership of it at the time, still less do I now . . . Julian Barnes
