Nothing to Be Frightened Of Quotes

“When we fall in love, we hope - both egotistically and altruistically - that we shall be finally, truly seen: judged and approved. Of course, love does not always bring approval: being seen may just as well lead to a thumbs-down and a season in hell.”
― Julian Barnes, Nothing to Be Frightened Of

“Memory is identity....You are what you have done; what you have done is in your memory; what you remember defines who you are; when you forget your life you cease to be, even before your death.”
― Julian Barnes, Nothing to Be Frightened Of

“We live, we die, we are remembered, we are forgotten.”
― Julian Barnes, Nothing to Be Frightened Of

“The writer has little control over personal temperament, none over historical moment, and is only partly in charge of his or her own aesthetic.”
― Julian Barnes, Nothing to Be Frightened Of

“For me, death is the one appalling fact which defines life; unless you are constantly aware of it, you cannot begin to understand what life is about; unless you know and feel that the days of wine and roses are limited, that the wine will madeirize and the roses turn brown in their stinking water before all are thrown out for ever- including the jug- there is no context to such pleasures and interests as come your way on the road to the grave.”
― Julian Barnes, Nothing to Be Frightened Of

“Our lack of originality is something we usefully forget as we hunch over our—to us—ever-fascinating lives. My friend M., leaving his wife for a younger woman, used to complain, “People tell me it’s a cliché. But it doesn’t feel like a cliché to me.” Yet it was, and is. As all our lives would prove, if we could see them from a greater distance—from the viewpoint, say, of that higher creature imagined by Einstein. ”
― Julian Barnes, Nothing to Be Frightened Of

“Life versus Death becomes, as Montaigne pointed out, Old Age versus Death. ”
― Julian Barnes, Nothing to Be Frightened Of

“I used to believe, when I was 'just' a reader, that writers, because they wrote books where truth was found, because they described the world, because they saw into the human heart, because they grasped both the particular and the general and were able to re-create both in free yet structured forms, because they understood, must therefore be more sensitive- also less vain, less selfish- than other people. Then I became a writer, and started meeting other writers, and studied them, and concluded that the only difference between them and other people, the only, single way in which they were better, was that they were better writers. They might indeed be sensitive, perceptive, wise, generalizing and particularizing- but only at their desks and in their books. When they venture out into the world, they regularly behave as if they have left all their comprehension of human behaviour stuck in their typescripts. It's not just writers either. How wise are philosophers in their private lives?”
― Julian Barnes, Nothing to Be Frightened Of

“I've never written a book, except my first, without at some point considering that I might die before it was completed. This is all part of the superstition, the folklore, the mania of the business, the fetishistic fuss.....Dying in the middle of a wo(rd), or three-fifths of the way through a nov(el). My friend the nov(el)ist Brian Moore used to fear this as well, though for an extra reason: "Because some bastard will come along and finish it for you." Here is a novelist's would-you-rather. Would you rather die in the middle of a book, and have some bastard finish it for you, or leave behind a work in progress that not a single bastard in the whole world was remotely interested in finishing?”
― Julian Barnes, Nothing to Be Frightened Of

“But art and religion will always shadow one another through the abstract nouns they both invoke: truth, seriousness, imagination, sympathy, morality, transcendence.”
― Julian Barnes, Nothing to Be Frightened Of

“The notion of redefining the deity into something that works for you is grotesque.”
― Julian Barnes, Nothing to Be Frightened Of

“Memory is identity. I have believed this since – oh, since I can remember. You are what you have done; what you have done is in your memory; what you remember defines who you are; when you forget your life you cease to be, even before your death.”
― Julian Barnes, Nothing to Be Frightened Of

“The mechanism of natural selection depends on the survival, not of the strongest, nor the most intelligent, but of the most adaptable.”
― Julian Barnes, Nothing to Be Frightened Of

“To die from 'a draining away of one's strength caused by extreme old age' was in Montaigne's day a 'rare, singular and extraordinary death.' Nowadays we assume it as our right.”
― Julian Barnes, Nothing to Be Frightened Of

“People say of death, “There’s nothing to be frightened of.” They say it quickly, casually. Now let’s say it again, slowly, with re-emphasis. “There’s NOTHING to be frightened of.” Jules Renard: “The word that is most true, most exact, most filled with meaning, is the word ‘nothing.”
― Julian Barnes, Nothing to Be Frightened of

“Grandpa, in his male armchair, deaf aid occasionally whistling and pipe making a hubble-bubble noise as he sucked on it, would shake his head over DAILY EXPRESS, which described to him a world where truth and justice were constantly imperilled by the Communist Threat. In her softer, female armchair - in the red corner - Grandma would tut-tut away over DAILY WORKER, which described to her a world where truth and justice, in their updated versions, were constantly imperilled by Capitalism and Imperialism.”
― Julian Barnes, Nothing to Be Frightened Of

“One small revenge might be to die and show no signs of having died.”
― Julian Barnes, Nothing to Be Frightened of

“This was a typical statement from my mother: lucid, opinionated, explicitly impatient of opposing views. Her dominance of the family, and her certainties about the world, made things usefully clear in childhood, restrictive in adolescence, and grindingly repetitive in adulthood.”
― Julian Barnes, Nothing to Be Frightened Of

“If I call myself an atheist at twenty, and an agnostic at fifty and sixty, it isn't because I have acquired more knowledge in the meantime: just more awareness of ignorance.”
― Julian Barnes, Nothing to Be Frightened Of

“These different kinds of truthfulness will be fully apparent to the young writer, and their joining together a matter of anxiety. For the older writer, memory and the imagination begin to seem less and less distinguishable. This is not because the imagined world is really much closer to the writer’s life than he or she cares to admit (a common error among those who anatomize fiction) but for exactly the opposite reason: that memory itself comes to seem much closer to an act of the imagination than ever before. My brother distrusts most memories. I do not mistrust them, rather I trust them as workings of the imagination, as containing imaginative as opposed to naturalistic truth.”
― Julian Barnes, Nothing to Be Frightened of

“Would you rather tear up your own expressions of love, or the ones you had received?”
― Julian Barnes, Nothing to Be Frightened Of

“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 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, or 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.”
― Julian Barnes, Nothing to Be Frightened Of

“Mortality often gatecrashes my consciousness when the outside world presents an obvious parallel: as evening falls, as the days shorten, or towards the end of a long day’s hiking.”
― Julian Barnes, Nothing to Be Frightened of

“Vivimos como si la memoria fuese una consigna de equipajes bien construida y atendida por un personal eficiente.”
― Julian Barnes, Nada que temer

“religions were the first great inventions of the fiction writers. A convincing representation and a plausible explanation of the world for understandably confused minds. A beautiful, shapely story containing hard, exact lies.”
― Julian Barnes, Nothing to Be Frightened of

“People say of death, 'There’s nothing to be frightened of'. They say it quickly, casually. Now let’s say it again, slowly, with re-emphasis. 'There’s NOTHING to be frightened of'. Jules Renard: 'The word that is most true, most exact, most filled with meaning, is the word nothing'.”
― Julian Barnes, Nothing to Be Frightened Of

“People say of death, 'There’s nothing to be frightened of.' They say it quickly, casually. Now let’s say it again, slowly, with re-emphasis. 'There’s NOTHING to be frightened of.' Jules Renard: “The word that is most true, most exact, most filled with meaning, is the word "nothing."' ...”
― Julian Barnes, Nothing to Be Frightened Of

“People say of death, 'There’s nothing to be frightened of.' They say it quickly, casually. Now let’s say it again, slowly, with re-emphasis. 'There’s NOTHING to be frightened of.' Jules Renard: “The word that is most true, most exact, most filled with meaning, is the word "nothing"'.”
― Julian Barnes, Nothing to Be Frightened Of

“One of Montaigne’s key instances is the story of Pomponius Atticus, a correspondent of Cicero’s. When Atticus fell ill, and medical attempts to prolong his existence merely prolonged his pain, he decided that the best solution was to starve himself to death. No need to petition a court in those days, citing the terminal deterioration in your “quality of life”: Atticus, being a Free Ancient, merely informed his friends and family of his intention, then refused food and waited for the end. In this, he was much confounded. Miraculously”
― Julian Barnes, Nothing to Be Frightened of

“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 identifiable 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