Julian Barnes Quotes

O aching time! O moments big as years!

For me, music was an age/time/place thing. One day I woke up and realized I was done. That was many years ago.

It would be ten years before they saw each other again, and their meeting would be thick with birds.

I have noticed that most men when they enter a barber shop and must wait their turn, drop into a chair and pick up a magazine. I simply sit down and pick up the thread of my sea wanderings, which began more than fifty years ago and is not quite ended. There is hardly a waiting room in the east that has not served as my cockpit, whether I was waiting to board a train or to see a dentist. And I am usually still trimming sheets when the train starts or drill begins to whine.

It was as though we were a picture, trapped in time: this had been happening for hundreds of years, people sitting in a room, waiting for dinner, and listening to the blues.

I'll always miss Mad Men, of course, but it is interesting to finally answer different questions after nine years. Not that that's a criticism to anyone, but just simply as a character for nine years, you're going to get a lot of the same questions for many, many, many years. This is sort of refreshing.

Even now, so many years after the end of the show, there are still new fans finding their way into Sunnydale. Buffy doesn't care that they're late to the game. She's been waiting for them - and she accepts all of them exactly as they are. Besides, no matter how many times you may have seen an episode, there's no such thing as an expert. I can guarantee there are always new and intriguing things to discover in Buffy; things that you missed somehow on previous viewings.

My heart born naked was swaddled in lullabies. Later alone it wore poems for clothes. Like a shirt I carried on my back the poetry I had read. So I lived for half a century until wordlessly we met. From my shirt on the back of the chair I learn tonight how many years of learning by heart I waited for you.

There was nothing new in sitting on this dock, on this or that wooden bench, watching for his boat to come. In some ways, she was always waiting for him.

I drank coffee and read old books and waited for the year to end.

Ten years from now you'll laugh at whatever's stressing you out today. So why not laugh now?

I seemed to have spent the whole time either reading, which I loved, or laughing, which I love, or fooling about, which I loved. There was the usual teenage angst: "Nobody understands me" and "I'm the only genius in the world" and all that stuff. But that didn't get very deep.

For years I feared the opening of every elevator, half-convinced that from the opened doors would come a bullet, for me, shot by a man in a tan trenchcoat. I have no idea why I feared this, expected it to happen. I even knew how I would react to this bullet coming from the elevator door, what word I would say. That word was: Finally.

Retiring and discovering that you no longer have enough energy to enjoy life and dying a few years out of sheer boredom.

Bella." Edward's voice was right beside me, relieved now. "Can you hear me?" "No," I groaned. "Go away.

I'd like to shower and change clothes," she said. "Would you mind waiting for me a half hour?" The question seemed to amuse him. "Not at all," he said with exaggerated formality. "Please take all the time you need." Michael watched her walk away. Did he mind waiting a half hour for her? Not at all. He'd been waiting years for her.

I wanted to tell her that sometimes, in my long sleep, I dreamt of her

While I complain of being able to glimpse no more than the shadow of the past, I may be insensitive to reality as it is taking shape at this very moment, since I have not reached the stage of development at which I would be capable of perceiving it. A few hundred years hence, in this same place, another traveller, as despairing as myself, will mourn the disappearance of what I might have seen, but failed to see.

I would just think that I would remember modeling for the cover of an album with Tom Waits, who I've always loved.

They say that if you get bored enough with calamity you can learn to laugh.

I loved the old stories in National Lampoon, like the original story the movie Vacation was based on. I used to laugh at them until I cried.

In the state I was in, if someone had come and told me I could go home quietly, that they would leave me my life whole, it would have left me cold: several hours or several years of waiting is all the same when you have lost the illusion of being eternal.

perfection. I have been waiting all my life to be with you. My heart slams against my ribs when I think of the slaughtered nights I spent all over the world waiting to feel your touch.

People like to warn you that by the time you reach the middle of your life, passion will begin to feel like a meal eaten long ago, which you remember with great tenderness.

the other guineahen died of a broken heart and we came to New York. I used to sit at a table,drawing wings with a pencil that kept breaking and i kept remembering how your mind looked when it slept for several years,to wake up asking why. So then you turned into a photograph of somebody who’s trying not to laugh at somebody who’s trying not to cry