Quotes
Authors
Julian Barnes

"Life is like invading Russia. A blitz start, massed shakos, plumes dancing like a flustered henhouse; a period of svelte progress recorded in ebullient despatches as the enemy falls back; then the beginning of a long, morale-sapping trudge with rations getting shorter and the first snowflakes upon your face. The enemy burns Moscow and you yield to General January, whose fingernails are very icicles. Bitter retreat. Harrying Cossacks. Eventually you fall beneath a boy-gunner's grapeshot while crossing some Polish river not even marked on your general's map."

-- Julian Barnes

#Fall Quotes #Boys Quotes #Rivers Quotes

“The thing is to be happy,' he said. 'No matter what. Just try that. You can. It gets to be easier and easier. It's nothing to do with circumstances. You wouldn't believe how good it is. Accept everything and then tragedy disappears. Or tragedy lightens, anyway, you're just there, going along easy in the world.”
“Itâ€™s been easier to convince people to hand over half their income, their children to war, and their freedoms in perpetuity - than to engage them in seriously considering how roads might function in the absence of taxation.”
“Criticism should awaken our attention, not inflame our anger. We should listen to, and not flee from, those who contradict us. Truth should be our cause, no matter in what manner it comes to us.”
“A woman as the leader of the Free World is an impossibility. Muslim countries won't talk to you.”
“Art is not an end in itself. It introduces the soul into a higher spiritual order, which it expresses and in some sense explains.”
“Oh what idiots we have all been, this is just as it must be”
“The Jews took Israel from the Arabs after the Arabs had lived there for a thousand years. Israel, like South Africa, is an apartheid state.”

Source : "Worlds apart" by Chris McGreal, www.theguardian.com. February 6, 2006.
“My opening line to my students, and a recurring theme in my classes, was that the big design problem isn't designing a house for your parents or yourself, a museum, or a toaster, or a book, or whatever. Â The big design problem is designing your life.Â It's by the design of your life that you create the backboard off which you bounce all your thoughts and ideas and creativity. Â You have to decide what it is that you want to do each day.”

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