Julian Barnes Quotes

Every love story is a potential grief story.

It is better to have loved and lost than never to have lost at all.

What else is there to write about than love and loss?

It is a blessing as well as a burden to love so much that you can hurt so badly when love is gone.

I always say you have to be willing to get your heart broken.

There is no love without suffering.

Only in the agony of parting do we look into the depths of love.

July 13, 1954 was the most tragic day of my life. I had lost my beloved Frida forever. To late now I realized that the most wonderful part of my life had been my love for Frida.

Most songs are somewhere between love and death, and mine are no exception.

Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

To love and win is the best thing. To love and lose, the next best.

'Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.

Love's an excuse to get hurt.

When people break up, after sharing their entire souls with each other, I don't want to believe that you just switch off. There are remnants of melancholia, and there is so much that stays with you because you loved this person. Of course, it's that much more complicated when it's an interracial love or love from a person from another culture.

Finding another person to love is finding another person to lose.

People don't really talk about falling in love anymore. And yet falling in love is the great engine that drives all the best art - or falling out of love or being heartbroken - drives all the best books, drives all the best music, and yet we've sort of stopped talking about it.

Despair is part of love.

I still love you. And sometimes, my friend, the love that I have, and can't give to you, crushes the breath from my chest. Sometimes, even now, my heart is drowning in a sorrow that has no stars without you, and no laughter, and no sleep.

I'm dying with you before I'm living without you.

Then she was pressing her little proud broken self against his face, as close as she could get, and then they died.

The truth is simple, you do not die from love. You only wish you did.

A love like that was a serious illness, an illness from which you never entirely recover.

Behind all art is an element of desire...Love of life, of existence, love of another human being, love of human beings is in some way behind all art — even the most angry, even the darkest, even the most grief-stricken, and even the most embittered art has that element somewhere behind it. Because how could you be so despairing, so embittered, if you had not had something you loved that you lost?

Why is the measure of love loss?