Anita Brookner Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“Real love is a pilgrimage. It happens when there is no strategy, but it is very rare because most people are strategists.”
-- Anita Brookner -
“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 -
“You never know what you will learn till you start writing. Then you discover truths you never knew existed.”
-- Anita Brookner -
“Great writers are the saints for the godless.”
-- Anita Brookner -
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“Always let them think of you as singing and dancing.”
-- Anita BrooknerSource : Anita Brookner (2012). “Dolly”, p.173, Vintage
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“I suppose what one wants really is ideal company and books are ideal company.”
-- Anita BrooknerSource : "Just don't mention Jane Austen". Interview with Robert McCrum, www.theguardian.com. January 27, 2001.
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“Time misspent in youth is sometimes all the freedom one ever has.”
-- Anita BrooknerSource : Anita Brookner (1986). “The Misalliance”, Pantheon
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“Dr Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature”
-- Anita BrooknerSource : "A Start in Life". Book by Anita Brookner, 1981.
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“I am 46, and have been for some time past.”
-- Anita Brookner -
“I was brought up among the sort of self-important women who had a husband as one has an alibi.”
-- Anita Brookner -
“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 -
“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 -
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“Fiction is the great repository of the moral sense. The wicked get punished.”
-- Anita Brookner -
“Writing has freed me from the despair of living.”
-- Anita Brookner -
“To remain pure, a novel has to cast a moral puzzle. Anything else is mere negotiation.”
-- Anita Brookner -
“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 BrooknerSource : Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.
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“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 -
“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 -
“For once a thing is known, it can never be unknown. It can only be forgotten.”
-- Anita BrooknerSource : Anita Brookner (2012). “Look at Me”, p.9, Vintage
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“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 -
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“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“It is best to marry for purely selfish reasons.”
-- Anita BrooknerSource : 1981 A Start in Life.
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“I think you always feel braver in another language.”
-- Anita Brookner -
“Satire is dependent on strong beliefs, and on strong beliefs wounded.”
-- Anita Brookner -
“The lessons taught in great books are misleading. The commerce in life is rarely so simple and never so just.”
-- Anita Brookner -
“Existentialism is about being a saint without God; being your own hero, without all the sanction and support of religion or society.”
-- Anita Brookner -
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“No blame should attach to telling the truth. But it does, it does.”
-- Anita Brookner -
“Accountability in friendship is the equivalent of love without strategy.”
-- Anita Brookner
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