Julian Barnes Quotes About Feelings
-
And no, it wasn't shame I now felt, or guilt, but something rarer in my life and stronger than both: remorse. A feeling which is more complicated, curdled, and primeval. Whose chief characteristic is that nothing can be done about it: too much time has passed, too much damage has been done, for amends to be made.
→ -
In my terms, I settled for the realities of life, and submitted to its necessities: if this, then that, and so the years passed. In Adrian's terms, I gave up on life, gave up on examining it, took it as it came. 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. All of it. I had lost the friends of my youth. I had lost the love of my wife. I had abandoned the ambitions I had entertained. I had wanted life not to bother me too much, and had succeeded - and how pitiful that was.
→ -
Though why should we expect age to mellow us? If it isn't life's business to reward merit, why should it be life's business to give us warm comfortable feelings towards its end? What possible evolutionary purpose could nostalgia serve?
→ -
Everything in art depends on execution: the story of a louse can be as beautiful as the story of Alexander. You must write according to your feelings, be sure those feelings are true, and let everything else go hang. When a line is good it ceases to belong to any school. A line of prose must be as immutable as a line of poetry.
→ -
But I’ve been turning over in my mind the question of nostalgia, and whether I suffer from it. I certainly don’t get soggy at the memory of some childhood knickknack; nor do I want to deceive myself sentimentally about something that wasn’t even true at the time—love of the old school, and so on. 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.
→
Related Authors
-
Salman Rushdie Novelist -
David Lodge Author -
Arthur Conan Doyle Physician -
Gustave Flaubert Writer -
Jonathan Franzen Novelist -
Peter Mayle Author -
Margaret Atwood Poet -
John Updike Novelist -
Milan Kundera Writer -
Alan Hollinghurst Novelist -
Paul Auster Author -
Patrick deWitt Novelist -
Carol Birch Novelist -
John Banville Novelist -
Martin Amis Novelist -
J. M. Coetzee Novelist -
Esi Edugyan Novelist -
Haruki Murakami Writer -
Ian Mcewan Novelist -
Kazuo Ishiguro Novelist