GRIEF

'...grief, as I said, is a state as well as a process. And as with love, time simultaneously both stops and moves. You want it to stop - to be a state, so that you can hold on as much as possible to the image and memory of the lost loved one; but you also want it to be a process, one which will convey you out of this strange new land of pain before your spirit breaks.'

Julian Barnes, Changing My Mind, p.56.

GRIEF

'It hurts just as much as it is worth'
Julian Barnes in Zadie Smith. 'Joy' in Feeling Free, p.435. 

PEOPLE

'I certainly believe we all suffer damage, one way or another. How could we not, except in a world of perfect parents, siblings, neighbours, companions? And then there is the question, on which so much depends, of how we react to the damage: whether we admit it or repress it, and how this affects our dealings with others. Some admit the damage, and try to mitigate it; some spend their lives trying to help others who are damaged; and then there are those whose main concern is to avoid further damage to themselves, at whatever cost. And those are the ones who are ruthless, and the ones to be careful of.'

Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending, p.44. 

YOUTH

'Yes, of course we were pretentious - what else is youth for?'
Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending, p.10. 

WISDOM

'Wisdom consists partly in not pretending any more, in discarding artiface.'

Julian Barnes, Nothing to be Frightened of, p.198.

PEOPLE

'We live broadly according to the tenets of a religion we no longer believe in. We live as if we are creatures of pure free will when philosophers and evolutionary biologists tell us this is largely a fiction. We live as if the memory were a well-built and efficiently staffed left luggage office. We live as if the soul - or spirit, or individuality, or personality - were an identiofiable and locatable entity rather than a story the brain tells itself. We live as if nature and nurture were equal parents when the evidence suggests that nature has both the whip hand and the whip.'

Julian Barnes, Nothing to be Frightened of, p.119.

INDIVIDUALISM

'The paradox is that individualism - the triumph of free-thinking artists and scientists - has led to a state of self-awareness in which we can now view ourselves as units of genetic obedience.'

Julian Barnes, Nothing to be Frightened of, p.93.

RELIGION

'Religion tends to authoritarianism as capitalism tends to monopoly.'
Julian Barnes, Nothing to be Frightened of, p.82.

ATHEISM

'The fury of the resurrected atheist: that would be something worth seeing.'
Julian Barnes, Nothing to be Frighthened of, p.64.

RELIGION & HEAVEN

'Just as there seems little point in religion which is merely a weekly social event (apart, of course, from the normal pleasures of a weekly social event), as supposed to one that tells you exactly how to live, which colours and stains everything, which is serious, so I would want my afterlife, if one's on offer, to be an improvement - preferably a substantial one - on its terrestrial predecessor. I can just about imagine slopping around half-unawares in some gooey molecular remix, but I can't see that this has any advantage over complete extinction.'

Julian Barnes, Nothing to be Frightened of, p.63.

GOD

'A common response in surveys of religious attitudes is to say something like, "I don't go to church, but I have my own personal idea of God." This kind of statement makes me in turn react like a philosopher. Soppy, I cry. You may have your own personal idea of God, but does God have His own personal idea of you? Because that's what matters. Whether He's an old man with a white beard sitting in the sky, a life force, or a disinterested prime mover, or a clockmaker, or a woman, or a nebulous moral force, or Nothing At All, what counts is what He, She, It or Nothing thinks of you rather than you of them. The notion of redefining the deity into something that works for you is grotesque. It also doesn't matter whether God is just or benevolent or even observant - of which there seems startlingly little proof - only that He exists.'

Julian Barnes, Nothing to be Frightened of, p.45.

GOD

'I don't believe in God, but I miss Him. That's what I say when the question is put. I asked my brother, who has taught philosophy at Oxford, Geneva and the Sorbonne, what he thought of such a statement, without revealing that it was my own. He replied with a single word: "Soppy"'
Julian Barnes, Nothing to be Frightened of , p.1.