Julian Barnes

Life versus Death becomes, as Montaigne pointed out, Old Age versus Death.

If you turned your back on irony, it curdled into sarcasm. And what good was it then? Sarcasm was irony which had lost its soul.

I don't ever want to get old. Spare me that. Have you the power? No, even you don't have the power, alas.

... forty's nothing, at fifty you're in your prime, sixty's the new forty, and so on.

When you__e young you prefer the vulgar months, the fullness of the seasons. As you grow older you learn to like the in-between times, the months that can__ make up their minds. Perhaps it__ a way of admitting that things can__ ever bear the same certainty again.

He always thought that Touie's long illness would somehow prepare him for her death. He always imagined that grief anf guilt, if they followed, would be more clear-edged, more defined, more finite. Instead they seem like weather, like clouds constantly re-forming into new shapes, blown by nameless, unidentifiable winds.

Our parents thought we might be corrupted by one another into becoming whatever it was they most feared: an incorrigible masturbator, a winsome homosexual, a recklessly impregnatory libertine. On our behalf they dreaded the closeness of adolescent friendship, the predatory behaviour of strangers on trains, the lure of the wrong kind of girl. How far their anxieties outran our experience.

I thought of the things that had happened to me over the years, and of how little I had made happen.

Is despair wrong? Isn__ it the natural condition of life after a certain age? _ After a number of events, what is there left but repetition and diminishment? Who wants to go on living? The eccentric, the religious, the artistic (sometimes); those with a false sense of their own worth. Soft cheeses collapse; firm cheeses endurate. Both go mouldy.

Our nights are different. She falls asleep like someone yielding to the gentle tug of a warm tide, and floats with confidence till morning. I fall asleep more grudgingly, thrashing at the waves, either reluctant to let a good day depart or still bitching about a bad one. Different currents run through our spells of unconsciousness.

..books look as if they contain knowledge, while e-readers look as if they contain information.

There is violence in this supposedly tender heart of mine.

Games are for childhood, and sometimes I think I lost my childhood young.

Memories of childhood were the dreams that stayed with you after you woke.

I am more optimistic, both about reading and about books. There will always be non-readers, bad readers, lazy readers _ there always were. Reading is a majority skill but a minority art. Yet nothing can replace the exact, complicated, subtle communion between absent author and entranced, present reader.

In life, every ending is just the start of another story.

In those days, we imagined ourselves as being kept in some kind of holding pen, waiting to be released into our lives. And when the moment came, our lives -- and time itself -- would speed up. How were we to know that our lives had in any case begun, that some advantage had already been gained, some damage already inflicted? Also, that our release would only be into a larger holding pen, whose boundaries would be at first undiscernible.

Perhaps this was one of the tragedies life plots for us: it is our destiny to become in old age what in youth we would have most despised.