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The Sense of an Ending QUOTES

The Sense of an Ending QUOTES

1 " How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but—mainly—to ourselves. "

― Julian Barnes , The Sense of an Ending

2 " Later on in life, you expect a bit of rest, don't you? You think you deserve it. I did, anyway. But then you begin to understand that the reward of merit is not life's business. "

― Julian Barnes , The Sense of an Ending

3 " 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? "

― Julian Barnes , The Sense of an Ending

4 " This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn't turn out to be like Literature. Look at our parents--were they the stuff of Literature? At best, they might aspire to the condition of onlookers and bystanders, part of a social backdrop against which real, true, important things could happen. Like what? The things Literature was about: Love, sex, morality, friendship, happiness, suffering, betrayal, adultery, good and evil, heroes and villains, guilt and innocence, ambition, power, justice, revolution, war, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, the individual against society, success and failure, murder, suicide, death, God. "

― Julian Barnes , The Sense of an Ending

5 " And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability. "

― Julian Barnes , The Sense of an Ending

6 " History isn't the lies of the victors, as I once glibly assured Old Joe Hunt; I know that now. It's more the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious or defeated. "

― Julian Barnes , The Sense of an Ending

7 " Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? "

― Julian Barnes , The Sense of an Ending

8 " Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time's malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing--until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return. "

― Julian Barnes , The Sense of an Ending

9 " I didn't doubt for a moment that she had read them all, or that they were the right books to own. Further, they seemed to be an organic combination of her mind and personality, whereas mine struck me as functionally separate, straining to describe a character I hoped to grow into. "

― Julian Barnes , The Sense of an Ending

10 " I remember what Old Joe Hun said when arguing with Adrian: that mental states can be inferred from actions. That’s in history—Henry VIII and all that. Whereas in the private life, I think the converse is true: that you can infer past actions from current mental states. "

― Julian Barnes , The Sense of an Ending

11 " If you'll excuse a brief history lesson: most people didn't experience 'the sixties' until the seventies. Which meant, logically, that most people in the sixties were still experiencing the fifties--or, in my case, bits of both decades side by side. Which made things rather confusing. "

― Julian Barnes , The Sense of an Ending

12 " 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. "

― Julian Barnes , The Sense of an Ending

13 " you find yourself repeating, ‘They grow up so quickly, don’t they?’ when all you really mean is: time goes faster for me nowadays. "

― Julian Barnes , The Sense of an Ending

14 " What was the point of having a situation worthy of fiction if the protagonist didn't behave as he would have done in a book? "

― Julian Barnes , The Sense of an Ending

15 " The law, and society, and religion all said it was impossible to be sane, healthy, and kill yourself. Perhaps those authorities feared that the suicide‟s reasoning might impugn the nature and value of life as organised by the
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state which paid the coroner? And then, since you had been declared temporarily mad, your reasons for killing yourself were also assumed to be mad. So I doubt anyone paid much attention to Adrian‟s argument, with its references to philosophers ancient and modern, about the superiority of the intervening act over the unworthy passivity of merely letting life happen to you. "

― Julian Barnes , The Sense of an Ending

16 " 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 , The Sense of an Ending

17 " When you are in your twenties, 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 , The Sense of an Ending

18 " Because just as all political and historical change sooner or later disappoints, so does adulthood. So does life. Sometimes I think the purpose of life is to reconcile us to its eventual loss by wearing us down, by proving, however long it takes, that life isn´t all it´s cracked up to be. "

― Julian Barnes , The Sense of an Ending

19 " What you end up remembering isn't always the same as what you have witnessed. "

― Julian Barnes , The Sense of an Ending

20 " I know this much: that there is objective time, but also subjective time, the kind you wear on the inside of your wrist, next to where the pulse lies. And this personal time, which is the true time, is measured in your relationship to memory. "

― Julian Barnes , The Sense of an Ending