Life is like invading Russia. A blitz start, massed shakos, plumes dancing like a flustered henhouse; a period of svelte progress recorded in ebullient despatches as the enemy falls back; then the beginning of a long, morale-sapping trudge with rations getting shorter and the first snowflakes upon your face. The enemy burns Moscow and you yield to General January, whose fingernails are very icicles. Bitter retreat. Harrying Cossacks. Eventually you fall beneath a boy-gunner's grapeshot while crossing some Polish river not even marked on your general's map.
Julian BarnesIn those days, we imagined ourselves as being kept in some kind of holding pen, waiting to be released into our lives. And when the moment came, our lives -- and time itself -- would speed up. How were we to know that our lives had in any case begun, that some advantage had already been gained, some damage already inflicted? Also, that our release would only be into a larger holding pen, whose boundaries would be at first undiscernible.
Julian BarnesA couple's first task, it has always seemed to me, is to solve the problem of breakfast; if this can be worked out amicably, most other difficulties can too.
Julian BarnesWhen you read a great book, you donโt escape from life, you plunge deeper into it. There may be a superficial escape โ into different countries, mores, speech patterns โ but what you are essentially doing is furthering your understanding of lifeโs subtleties, paradoxes, joys, pains and truths. Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic.
Julian BarnesIs despair wrong? Isnโt it the natural condition of life after a certain age? โฆ 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 endurate. Both go mouldy.
Julian Barnes