Anita Brookner famous quotes

Real love is a pilgrimage. It happens when there is no strategy, but it is very rare because most people are strategists.
-- Anita Brookner

#Relationship #Real #Love Is

In real life, it is the hare who wins. Every time. Look around you. And in any case it is my contention that Aesop was writing for the tortoise market. Hares have no time to read. They are too busy winning the game.
-- Anita Brookner

#Real #Writing #Winning

You never know what you will learn till you start writing. Then you discover truths you never knew existed.
-- Anita Brookner

#Writing

Great writers are the saints for the godless.
-- Anita Brookner

#God #Writing #Saint

Always let them think of you as singing and dancing.
-- Anita Brookner

#Dance #Thinking #Dancing

I suppose what one wants really is ideal company and books are ideal company.
-- Anita Brookner

#Book #Want #Company

Time misspent in youth is sometimes all the freedom one ever has.
-- Anita Brookner

#Youth #Sometimes

Dr Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature
-- Anita Brookner

#Drs #Literature #Ruined

I am 46, and have been for some time past.
-- Anita Brookner

#Past #Age

I was brought up among the sort of self-important women who had a husband as one has an alibi.
-- Anita Brookner

#Husband #Self #Important

One loses the capacity to grieve as a child grieves, or to rage as a child rages: hotly, despairingly, with tears of passion. One grows up, one becomes civilized, one learns one's manners, and consequently can no longer manage these two functions - sorrow and anger - adequately.
-- Anita Brookner

#Children #Growing Up #Passion

I need noise and interruptions and irritation: irritation and discomfort are a great starter. The loneliness of doing it any other way would kill me.
-- Anita Brookner

#Loneliness #Irritation #Way

Fiction is the great repository of the moral sense. The wicked get punished.
-- Anita Brookner

#Wicked #Fiction #Moral

Writing has freed me from the despair of living.
-- Anita Brookner

#Writing #Despair

To remain pure, a novel has to cast a moral puzzle. Anything else is mere negotiation.
-- Anita Brookner

#Writing #Moral #Negotiation

There are moments when you feel free, moments when you have energy, moments when you have hope, but you can't rely on any of these things to see you through. Circumstances do that.
-- Anita Brookner

#Energy #Moments #Circumstances

You can never betray the people who are dead, so you go on being a public Jew; the dead can't answer slurs, but I'm here. I would love to think that Jesus wants me for a sunbeam, but he doesn't.
-- Anita Brookner

#Jesus #Thinking #People

It will be a pity if women in the more conventional mould are to be phased out, for there will never be anyone to go home to.
-- Anita Brookner

#Women #Home #Pity

For once a thing is known, it can never be unknown. It can only be forgotten.
-- Anita Brookner

#Forgotten

The evening passes somehow; I watch television with Nancy, or I write. It is difficult, not having a family, and it is difficult to explain. I always go to bed early. And I am always ready for Monday morning, that time that other people dread.
-- Anita Brookner

#Monday #Morning #Writing

Life is a pilgrimage and if you don't play by the rules you don't find the Road to Damascus, you find the Crown of Thorns.
-- Anita Brookner

#Life #Play #Thorns

You are wrong if you think you cannot live without love. I cannot live without it. I do not mean that I go into a decline, develop odd symptoms, became a caricature. I mean that I cannot live well without it. I cannot think or act or speak or write or even dream with any kind of energy in the absence of love. I feel excluded from the living world. I become cold, fish-like, immobile. I implode.
-- Anita Brookner

#Love #Dream #Writing

I am not a romantic. I am a domestic animal. I do not sigh and yearn for extravagant displays of passion, for the grand affair, the world well lost for love. I know all that, and know that it leaves you lonely. No, what I crave is the simplicity of routine. An evening walk, arm in arm, in fine weather. A game of cards. Time for idle talk. Preparing a meal together.
-- Anita Brookner

#Lonely #Passion #Animal

It is best to marry for purely selfish reasons.
-- Anita Brookner

#Selfish #Reason

I think you always feel braver in another language.
-- Anita Brookner

#Thinking #Language #Feels

Satire is dependent on strong beliefs, and on strong beliefs wounded.
-- Anita Brookner

#Strong #Belief #Satire

The lessons taught in great books are misleading. The commerce in life is rarely so simple and never so just.
-- Anita Brookner

#Book #Writing #Simple

Existentialism is about being a saint without God; being your own hero, without all the sanction and support of religion or society.
-- Anita Brookner

#Philosophical #Hero #Support

No blame should attach to telling the truth. But it does, it does.
-- Anita Brookner

#Truth #Doe #Blame

Accountability in friendship is the equivalent of love without strategy.
-- Anita Brookner

#Love #Friendship #Accountability

Writing novels preserves you in a state of innocence - a lot passes you by - simply because your attention is otherwise diverted.
-- Anita Brookner

#Writing #Attention #Innocence

A complete woman is probably not a very admirable creature. She is manipulative, uses other people to get her own way, and works within whatever system she is in.
-- Anita Brookner

#Women #People #Use

Life... is not simply a series of exciting new ventures. The future is not always a whole new ball game. There tends to be unfinished business. One trails all sorts of things around with one, things that simply won't be got rid of.
-- Anita Brookner

#Games #Balls #Venture

Like many rich men, he thought in anecdotes; like many simple women, she thought in terms of biography.
-- Anita Brookner

#Women #Simple #Thinking

The essence of romantic love is that wonderful beginning, after which sadness and impossibility may become the rule.
-- Anita Brookner

#Love #Happiness #Sadness

What is interesting about self-analysis is that it leads nowhere - it is an art form in itself.
-- Anita Brookner

#Art #Self #Interesting

Problems of human behavior still continue to baffle us, but at least in the Library we have them properly filed.
-- Anita Brookner

#Library #Problem #Behavior

And without understanding, could each properly love the other?
-- Anita Brookner

#Understanding

That sun, that light had faded, and she had faded with them. Now she was as grey as the season itself.
-- Anita Brookner

#Light #Sun #Grey

You have no idea how promising the world begins to look once you have decided to have it all for yourself. And how much healthier your decisions are once they become entirely selfish.
-- Anita Brookner

#Selfish #Ideas #Decision

You can never betray the people who are dead.
-- Anita Brookner

#Betrayal #People #Betray

All good fortune is a gift of the gods, and you don't win the favor of the ancient gods by being good, but by being bold.
-- Anita Brookner

#Winning #Favors #Ancient

Good women always think it is their fault when someone else is being offensive. Bad women never take the blame for anything.
-- Anita Brookner

#Women #Thinking #Good Woman

Romanticism is not just a mode; it literally eats into every life. Women will never get rid of just waiting for the right man.
-- Anita Brookner

#Men #Romance #Waiting

A man can go from being a lover to being a stranger in three moves flat but a woman under the guise of friendship will engage in acts of duplicity which come to light very much later. There are different species of self-justification.
-- Anita Brookner

#Love #Moving #Men

A man of such obvious and exemplary charm must be a liar.
-- Anita Brookner

#Liars #Lying #Men