Julian Barnes

Life seemed even more of a guessing game than usual.

When I was still quite young I had a complete presentiment of life. It was like the nauseating smell of cooking escaping from a ventilator: you don't have to have eaten it to know that it would make you throw up.

And what percentage of people take up the option to die off?_ She looked at me, her glance telling me to be calm. __h, a hundred per cent, of course. Over many thousands of years, calculated by old time, of course. But yes, everyone takes the option, sooner or later.___o it__ just like the first time round? You always die in the end?___es, except don__ forget the quality of life here is much better. People die when they decide they__e had enough, not before. The second time round it__ altogether more satisfying because it__ willed._ She paused, then added, __s I say, we cater for what people want.__ hadn__ been blaming her. I__ not that sort. I just wanted to find out how the system worked. __o _ even people, religious people, who come here to worship God throughout eternity _ they end up throwing in the towel after a few years, hundred years, thousand years?___ertainly. As I said, there are still a few Old Heaveners around, but their numbers are diminishing all the time.

Was it the case that colours dimmed as the eye grew elderly? Or was it rather that in youth your excitement about the world transferred itself onto everything you saw and made it brighter?

You can't love someone without imaginative sympathy, without beginning to see the world from another point of view. You can't be a good lover, a good artist or a good politician without this capacity (you can get away with it, but that's not what I mean). Show me the tyrants who have been great lovers.

But life never lets you go, does it? You can't put down life the way you put down a book.

The mechanism of natural selection depends on the survival, not of the strongest, nor the most intelligent, but of the most adaptable.

May you be ordinary, as the poet once wished the new-born baby.

And perhaps it was also the case that, for all a lifetime's internal struggling, you were finally no more than what others saw you as. That was your nature, whether you liked it or not.

Opera cuts to the chase__s death does. An art which seeks, more obviously than any other form, to break your heart.

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.

My brother distrusts the essential truth of memories; I distrust the way we colour them in. We each have our own cheap-mail-order paintbox, and our favourite hues. Thus, I remembered Grandma a few pages ago as "petite and unopinionated". My brother, when consulted, takes out his paintbrush and counterproposes "short and bossy.

What was the point of scientific advance without moral advance? The railway would merely permit more people to move about, meet and be stupid together

Not merely hope, but any burdensome yearning: ambition, hatred, love (especially love) - how rarely do our emotions meet the object they seem to deserve? How hopelessly we signal; how dark the sky; how big the waves. We are all lost at see, washed between hope and despair, hailing something that may never come to rescue us. Catastrophe has become art; but this is no reducing process. It is freeing, enlarging, explaining. Catastrophe has become art: that is, after all, what it is for.

Mariac tells us about the books he's read, the painters he's liked, the plays he's seen. He finds himself by looking in the works of others. He defines his own faith by a passionate anger against Gide the Luciferian. Reading his 'memories' is like meeting a man on a train who says, 'Don't look at me; that's misleading. If you want to know what I'm like, wait until we're in a tunnel, and then study my reflection in the window.' You wait, and look, and catch a face against a shifting background of sooty walls, cables, and sudden brickwork. The transparent shape flickers and jumps, always a few feet away. You become accustomed to its existence, you move with its movements; and though you know its presence is conditional, you feel it to be permanent. Then there is a wail from ahead, a roar and a burst of light; the face is gone for ever.

You can define a net two ways, depending on your point of view. Normally you would say it is a meshed instrument designed to catch fish. But you could, with no great injury to logic, reverse the image and define the net as a jocular lexicographer once did: he called it a collection of holes tied together with string.