“Is there anything more plausible than a second hand?” — Julian Barnes Quote

“Is there anything more plausible than a second hand?”

“Do we tend to recall the most important parts of a novel or those that speak most directly to us, the truest lines or the flashiest ones?”

“I'm a novelist, so I can't write about ideas unless they're attached to people.”

“This was long before the term 'single-parent family' came into use; back then it was a 'broken home'...”

“Iconic Paris tells us: here are our three-star attractions, go thou and marvel. And so we gaze obediently at what we are told to gaze at, without exactly asking why.”

“Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic. And for this serious task of imaginative discovery and self-discovery, there is and remains one perfect symbol: the printed book.”

“The library, then, at seven-fifteen, seven-thirty, seven-forty-five of a Sunday night, cloistered with great drifts of silence and transfixed avalanche of books poised like the cuneiform stones of eternity on shelves, so high the unseen snows of time fell all year there.”

“It is too late.”

“If you know how the LORD God has lead you, you are confident of all His precious promises which He fulfills in His perfect time.”

“Patience is allowing time to work in your place.”

“Give time time.”

“At that moment the rooster was a tiny, light brown, fluffy ball. No clues to future developments could yet be discerned. All existence went along happily under the will of heaven. With the accelerating motion of nonexistence, unstable embarrassing details gradually displaced themselves.”