Pulse Quotes

“You would think, wouldn’t you, that if you were the child
of a happy marriage, then you ought to have a better than
average marriage yourself – either through some genetic
inheritance or because you’d learnt from example? But it
doesn’t seem to work like that. So perhaps you need the
opposite example – to see mistakes in order not to make
them yourself. Except this would mean that the best way for
parents to ensure their children have happy marriages
would be to have unhappy ones themselves. So what’s the
answer?”
― Julian Barnes, Pulse

“When we're onstage we're not literature, we're sitcom. You have to have catchphrases.”
― Julian Barnes, Pulse

“- Is recycling to do with global warming?
- Need you ask?
- Well, I only ask because we've been recycling for twenty years or so, and no one was talking about global warming back then.”
― Julian Barnes, Pulse

“Era ciudat felul în care, pe măsură ce îmbătrâneai, vanitatea era tot mai puțin un viciu și devenea aproape opusul ei: o cerință morală.”
― Julian Barnes, Pulse

“Nu cred că mi-ar plăcea un zeu dezaprobator. Oricum ai parte de destulă dezaprobare în viață. Milă, iertare și-nțelegere - de astea avem nevoie. Și de ideea unui plan de ansamblu.”
― Julian Barnes, Pulse

“Jake, who is both fitter and more hedonistic than me, once told me what they say about martinis: "One's perfect. Two's too many. And three's not enough.”
― Julian Barnes, Pulse

“Better to take life seriously, and reach for light solutions. Satire, for instance; or suicide. Why did people hold so fast to life, that thing they were given without being consulted? All lives were failures, in Alice’s reading of the world, and Jane’s platitude about turning failure into art was fluffy fantasy. Anyone who understood art knew that it never achieved what its maker dreamt for it. Art always fell short, and the artist, far from rescuing something from the disaster of life, was thereby condemned to be a double failure”
― Julian Barnes, Pulse

“Alice was surprised. In her worldview, everything was hopeless, but you just had to get on with it. And there wasn’t much point changing what you believed at this late stage of the game.”
― Julian Barnes, Pulse

“The conservative, the slow-witted and the envious existed in every profession.”
― Julian Barnes, Pulse

“That was another nice thing about my parents. There was none of that holding on to knowledge and power that some parents go in for. We were all adults together, on a plateau of equality.”
― Julian Barnes, Pulse