Julian Barnes Quotes

It's so much better to desire than to have.

Never lose sight of the fact that all human felicity lies in man's imagination, and that he cannot think to attain it unless he heeds all his caprices. The most fortunate of persons is he who has the most means to satisfy his vagaries.

If you desire something, you don't have it. It is more interesting than enjoyment, because enjoyment erases the mysteries and the vision of desire. Desire opens up possibilities but never achieves anything, whereas enjoyment is just the brutal achievement of something - and after that, it's done.

Memory is satisfied desire.

Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory.

After a time, you may find that having is not so pleasing a thing after all as wanting. It is not logical, but is often true.

Desire is happiness: satisfaction as happiness is merely the ultimate moment of desire. To be wish and wish alone is happiness, and a new wish over and over again.

While we desire, we do not enjoy; and with enjoyment desire ceases.

Happiness is the longing for repetition.

Behavioral psychologists have observed that wanting something has a much stronger emotional impact than the pleasure that comes once you have it, or the memory of having had it.

It's so much better to desire than to have.... The moment of desire, when you know something is going to happen - that's the most exalting.

Happiness is not only a hope, but also in some strange manner a memory ... we are all kings in exile.

Doesn't one always think of the past, in a garden with men and women lying under the trees? Aren't they one's past, all that remains of it, those men and women, those ghosts lying under the trees ... one's happiness, one's reality?

Some things are so impossible, so fantastic, that when they happen, you are not at all surprised. Their sheer impossibility has made you imagine them too many times in your head, and when you find yourself on that longed-for moonlit path, it seems unreal but still, somehow, familiar. You dreamed of it, of course; you know it like a memory.

Satisfaction, even after one has dined well, is not so interesting and eager a feeling as hunger.

There is no fulfillment that is not made sweeter for the prolonging of desire

Of one thing alone I am very sure: it is a law of our nature that the memory of longing should survive the more fugitive memory of fulfillment.

That in all these worldly Things, that a Man pursues with the greatest Eagerness and Intention of Mind imaginable, he finds not half the Pleasure in the actual Possession of them, that he proposed to himself in the Expectation.

You mayn't get the things themselves; but nothing can prevent you from having the fun of looking forward to them.

...as long as nothing happens between them, the memory is cursed with what hasn't happened.

Hope is a memory that desires, the memory is a memory that has enjoyed.

Philebus was saying that enjoyment and pleasure and delight, and the class of feelings akin to them, are a good to every living being, whereas I contend, that not these, but wisdom and intelligence and memory, and their kindred, right opinion and true reasoning, are better and more desirable than pleasure

The pleasure of expecting enjoyment is often greater than that of obtaining it, and the completion of almost every wish is found a disappointment.