Levels Of Life Julian Barnes Quotes

Every love story is a potential grief story.

Nature is so exact, it hurts exactly as much as it is worth, so in a way one relishes the pain, I think. If it didn't matter, it wouldn't matter.

Because love is the meeting point of truth and magic. Truth, as in photography; magic, as in ballooning.

You put together two things that have not been put together before. And the world is changed. People may not notice at the time, but that doesn’t matter. The world has been changed nonetheless.

You put together two people who have not been put together before. Sometimes it is like that first attempt to harness a hydrogen balloon to a fire balloon: do you prefer crash and burn, or burn and crash? But sometimes it works, and something new is made, and the world is changed. Then, at some point, sooner or later, for this reason or that, one of them is taken away. and what is taken away is greater than the sum of what was there. this may not be mathematically possible; but it is emotionally possible.

Love may not lead where we think or hope, but regardless of outcome it should be a call to seriousness and truth. If it is not that - if it is not moral in its effect - then love is no more than an exaggerated form of pleasure.

What happiness is there in just the memory of happiness?

There is a German word, Sehnsucht, which has no English equivalent; it means 'the longing for something'. It has Romantic and mystical connotations; C.S. Lewis defined it as the 'inconsolable longing' in the human heart for 'we know not what'. It seems rather German to be able to specify the unspecifiable. The longing for something - or, in our case, for someone.

This is what those who haven’t crossed the tropic of grief often fail to understand: the fact that someone is dead may mean that they are not alive, but doesn’t mean that they do not exist.

Grief reconfigures time, its length, its texture, its function: one day means no more than the next, so why have they been picked out and given separate names?

You put together two things that have not been put together before. And the world is changed...

Perhaps the world progresses not by maturing, but by being in a permanent state of adolescence, of thrilled discovery.

You lose the world for a glance? Of course you do. That is what the world is for: to lose under the right circunstances.

It is all just the universe doing its stuff, and we are the stuff it is being done to.

We live on the flat, on the level, and yet - and so - we aspire. Groundlings, we can sometimes reach as far as the gods. Some soar with art, others with religion; most with love. But when we soar, we can also crash. There are few soft landings. We may find ourselves bouncing across the ground with leg-fracting force, dragged towards some foreign railway line. Every love story is a potential grief story. If not at first, then later. If not for one, then for the other. Sometimes, for both.

Early in life, the world divides crudely into those who have had sex and those who haven't. Later, into those who have known love, and those who haven't. Later still - at least, if we are lucky (or, on the other hand, unlucky) - it divides into those who have endured grief, and those who haven't. These divisions are absolute; they are tropics we cross.

Every love story is a potential grief story. If not at first, then later. If not for one, then for the other. Sometimes for both.

There are two essential kinds of loneliness: that of not having found someone to love, and that of having been deprived of the one you did love. The first kind is worse. Nothing can compare to the loneliness of the soul in adolescence.

The heart of my life; the life of my heart.

The, at some point, sooner or later, for this reason or that, one of them is taken away. And what is taken away is greater than the sum of what was there. This may not be mathematically possible; but it is emotionally possible.

But if being on the level didn't shield you from pain, maybe it was better to be up in the clouds.

Why should anything happen when everything has happened?

(...) juries should ask not "Is he guilty?" but rather "Is he dangerous?

There is a grotesquerie to grief as well. You lose the sense of your existence being rational, or justifiable. You feel absurd.

The conventional accept and are frequently charmed by a certain unconventionality.

Todas as histórias de amor são potenciais histórias de dor. Se não no princípio, depois. Se não para um, para o outro. Às vezes para ambos.

You put together two people who have not been put together before; and sometimes the world is changed, sometimes not. They may crash and burn, or burn and crash. But sometimes, something new is made, and then the world is changed. Together, in that first exaltation, that first roaring sense of uplift, they are greater than their two separate selves. Together, they see further, and they see more clearly.

Initially, you continue doing what you used to do with her, out of familiarity, love, the need for a pattern. Soon, you realise the trap you are in: caught between repeating what you did with her, but without her, and so missing her; or doing new things, things you never did with her, and so missing her differently. You feel sharply the loss of shared vocabulary, of tropes, teases, short cuts, injokes, sillinesses, faux rebukes, amatory footnotes – all those obscure references rich in memory but valueless if explained to an outsider.

I swiftly realised how grief sorts out and realigns those around the griefstruck; how friends are tested; how some pass, some fail. Old friendships may deepen through shared sorrow; or suddenly appear lightweight.

Throw off your grief,' doubters imply, 'and we can all go back to pretending death doesn't exist, or at least is comfortably far away.

And everything you do, or might achieve thereafter, is thinner, weaker, matters less. There is no echo coming back; no texture, no resonance, no depth of field.

Aeronautics did not lead to democracy, unless budget airlines count.

Studies of cancer patients show that attitudes of mind have very little effect on clinical outcome. We may say we are fighting cancer, but cancer is merely fighting us; we may think we have beaten it, when it has only gone away to regroup. It is all just the universe doing its stuff, and we are the stuff it is being done to. And so, perhaps, with grief. We imagine we have battled against it, been purposeful, overcome sorrow, scrubbed the rust from our soul, when all that has happened is that grief has moved elsewhere, shifted its interest.

Every love story is a potential grief story. If not at first, then later. If not for one, then for the other. Sometimes, for both. So why do we constantly aspire to love? because love is the meeting point of truth and magic.

At times it feels as if life itself is the greatest loser, the true bereaved party, because it is no longer subjected to that radiant curiosity of hers.

And you can never prepare for this new reality in which you have been dunked.

It took a while, but I remember the moment – or rather, the suddenly arriving argument – which made it less likely that I would kill myself. I realised that, insofar as she was alive at all, she was alive in my memory. Of course, she remained powerfully in other people’s minds as well; but I was her principal rememberer. If she was anywhere, she was within me, internalised. This was normal. And it was equally normal – and irrefutable – that I could not kill myself because then I would also be killing her.

Early in life, the world divides crudely into those who have had sex and those who haven’t. Later, into those who have known love, and those who haven’t. Later still—at least, if we are lucky (or, on the other hand, unlucky)—it divides into those who have endured grief, and those who haven’t. These divisions are absolute; they are tropics we cross.

Such was humanity’s self-love, Nadar concluded, that most were inevitably disappointed when they finally saw a true image of themselves.

And since the griefstruck rarely know what they need or want, only what they don’t, offence-giving and offence-taking are common.

Insofar as I liked doing things by myself, it was partly for the pleasure of telling her about them afterwards.

Naturalness onstage is just as much an artifice as naturalism in the novel

Though I remember, sharply, last things. The last book she read. The last play (and film, and concert, and opera, and art exhibition) that we went to together. The last wine she drank, the last clothes she bought. The last weekend away. The last bed we slept in that wasn't ours. The last this, the last that. The last piece of my writing that made her laugh. The last words she wrote herself; the last time she signed her name. The last piece of music I played her when she came home. Her last complete sentence. Her last spoken word.

Altitude reduces all things to their relative proportions, and to the truth. Cares, remorse, disgust become strangers: How easily indifference, contempt, forgetfulness drop away...and forgiveness descends.

When we killed – or exiled – God, we also killed ourselves. Did we notice that sufficiently at the time? No God, no afterlife, no us. We were right to kill Him, of course, this long-standing imaginary friend of ours. And we weren’t going to get an afterlife anyway. But we sawed off the branch we were sitting on. And the view from there, from that height – even if it was only the illusion of a view – wasn’t so bad.

At a social event she and I would normally have attended together, an acquaintance came up and said to me, simply, “There’s someone missing.” That felt correct, in both senses.

The final tormenting, unanswerable question: what is 'success' in mourning?

Constantly he went back over the evidence of his memories.

What did I care about saving the world if the world couldn’t, wouldn’t, save her?

Opera cuts to the chase—as death does. An art which seeks, more obviously than any other form, to break your heart.

Part of love is preparing for death... Afterwards comes the madness. And then the loneliness... [People say] you'll come out of it... And you do come out of it, that's true. But you don't come out of it like a train coming out of a tunnel, bursting through the Downs into sunshine and that swift, rattling descent to the Channel; you come out of it as a gull comes out of an oil slick; you are tarred and feathered for life.

And this is where the Silent Ones cause further offense. They do not understand (how could they?) that they have a new function in your life. You need your friends not just as friends, but also as corroborators. The chief witness to what has been your life is now silenced, and retrospective doubt is inevitable.

But he would never join their number, never be a member of the smiling retinue of former lovers. He considered that sort of behavior rather beastly, in fact immoral. He refused to be turned from a lover into a dear friend. He was uninterested in that transition.

Metti insieme due persone che insieme non sono mai state; a volte il mondo cambia e a volte no. Può darsi che si schiantino e prendano fuoco, o che prendano fuoco e si schiantino. Ma a volte, invece, ne nasce qualcosa di nuovo, e allora il mondo cambia. Insieme, in quel primo momento esaltante, con quella sensazione esplosiva di ascesa, esse sono più grandi dei loro sé individuali. Insieme, vedono più lontano, più chiaro.

Grief-work. It sounds such a clear and solid concept, with its confident two-part name. But it is fluid, slippery, metamorphic. Sometimes it is passive, a waiting for time and pain to disappear; sometimes active, a conscious attention to death and loss and the loved one; sometimes necessarily distractive (the bland football match, the overwhelming opera).

Had he been naive, or overambitious? Both, probably. In life, you might be a bohemian and an adventurer, but you also sought a pattern, an arrangement to help you through, even if -- even as -- you kicked against it.

Then, at some point, sooner or later, for this reason or that, one of them is taken away. And what is taken away is greater than the sum of what was there. This may not be mathematically possible; but it is emotionally possible.

Had she told him that she loved him? Yes, of course, many times; but it was his imagination—the prompter’s voice at his ear—which had added the words “for ever.” He hadn’t asked what she meant when she told him she loved him. What lover ever does? Those plush and gilded words rarely seem to need annotation at the time.

Look what she has lost, now that she has lost life. Her body, her spirit; her radiant curiosity about life. At times it feels as if life itself is the greatest loser, the true bereaved party, because it is no longer subjected to that radiant curiosity of hers.

And so, perhaps, with grief. We imagine we have battled against it, been purposeful, overcome sorrow, scrubbed the rust from our soul, when all that has happened is that grief has moved elsewhere, shifted its interest. We did not make the clouds come in the first place, and have no power to disperse them. All that has happened is that from somewhere -- or nowhere -- an unexpected breeze has sprung up, and we are in movement again.

At best you have one of those debilitating conditions which come in many forms, and which some people decline to admit actually exist.

The more so because, among its repetitions, it is always looking for new ways to prick you.

When I felt myself escaping from the earth,” he commented, “my reaction was not pleasure but happiness.” It was “a moral feeling,” he added. “I could hear myself living, so to speak.

There is the question of loneliness. But again, this is not how you imagined it (if you had ever tried to imagine it). There are two essential kinds of loneliness: that of not having found someone to love, and that of having been deprived of the one you did love. The first kind is worse.

For here is the final tormenting, unanswerable question: what is “success” in mourning? Does it lie in remembering or in forgetting? A staying still or a moving on? Or some combination of both?

So now, contended indifference before Middlesbrough against Slovan Bratislava coexisted with a craving for an art in which violent, overwhelming, hysterical and destructive emotion was the norm.

I think it was the Earthrise that really kind of got everybody in the solar plexus … We were looking back at our planet, the place where we evolved. Our Earth was quite colorful, pretty and delicate compared to the very rough, rugged, beat-up, even boring lunar surface. I think it struck everybody that here we’d come 240,000 miles to see the Moon and it was the Earth that was really worth looking at. At

Major General Anders later reflected: I think it was the Earthrise that really kind of got everybody in the solar plexus … We were looking back at our planet, the place where we evolved. Our Earth was quite colorful, pretty and delicate compared to the very rough, rugged, beat-up, even boring lunar surface. I think it struck everybody that here we’d come 240,000 miles to see the Moon and it was the Earth that was really worth looking at.

And he was not angry. But, before the pain set in, he had the time to be rueful. He had laid everything out, the best of himself, and it had not been enough. He had considered himself a bohemian, but she had proved too bohemian for him. And he had failed to understand her explanation of herself.

You marry to continue the conversation.

The next day, all that stopped him from feeling pure exultance was the question: had it been too easy?

Belki de her türlü ortak motifi ortadan kaldıran keder daha da fazlasını ortadan kaldırıyor: ortak motiflerin var olduğuna olan inancı.

But aeronautics purged the sin of height, otherwise known as the sin of getting above yourself.

¿Pierdes el mundo por una mirada? Pues claro que sí. Para eso es el mundo: para perderlo en las circunstancias apropiadas.

هر داستان عاشقانه، بالقوه، داستان اندوه نیز هست.

those photographs taken from lunar orbit, in which our planet looks more or less like any other planet (except to an astronomer): silent, revolving, beautiful, dead, irrelevant.

Perhaps grief, which destroys all patterns, destroys even more,: the belief that any pattern exists

Throw off your grief,' such doubters imply, 'and we can all go back to pretending that death doesn't exist, or at least is comfortably far away.

I keep alive our lost private language.

Sabía ya que sólo las viejas palabras servían: muerte, congoja, tristeza, pesar, sufrimiento. Nada moderadamente evasivo o medicinal. La aflicción es un estado humano, no médico, y aunque haya píldoras que nos ayuden a olvidarla - y todo lo demás -, no hay pastillas que la curen. Los afligidos no están deprimidos, sino solo debidamente, adecuada, matemáticamente tristes.

We could not be further from ballooning’s established tropes: freedom, spiritual exaltation, human progress. Redon’s eternally open eye is deeply unsettling. The eye in the sky; God’s security camera. And that lumpish human head invites us to conclude that the colonisation of space doesn’t purify the colonisers; all that has happened is that we have brought our sinfulness to a new location.

...Y lo mismo ocurre con nuestra vida: tan clara, tan segura, hasta que por una razón u otra —el globo se mueve, la nube se dispersa, el sol cambia de ángulo— la imagen se pierde para siempre, se torna accesible sólo al recuerdo, se convierte en anécdota.

Of course, opera has plot – and I was already anticipating all those unknown stories I was about to discover – but its main function is to deliver the characters as swiftly as possible to the point where thet can sing of their deepest emotions. Opera cuts to the chase – as death does. So now, contented indifference before Middlesbrough against Slovan Bratislava coexisted with a craving for an art in which violent, overwhelming, hysterical and destructive emotion was the norme; an art which seeks, more obviously than any other form, to break your heart.

So now, contented indifference before Middlesbrough against Slovan Bratislava coexisted with a craving for an art in which violent, overwhelming, hysterical and destructive emotion was the norm; an art which seeks, more obviously than any other form, to break your heart. Here was my new social realism.

Naturally, she had enemies. Her success, her sex, her racial origin and her bohemian extravagance reminded the puritanical why actors used to be buried in unhallowed ground. And over the decades her acting style, once so original, inevitably dated, since naturalness onstage is just as much an artifice as naturalism in the novel. If the magic always worked for some—Ellen Terry called her “transparent as an azalea” and compared her stage presence to “smoke from a burning paper”—others were less kind. Turgenev, though a Francophile and himself a dramatist, found her “false, cold, affected,” and condemned her “repulsive Parisian chic.

Daha önce bir araya getirilmemiş iki kişiyi bir araya getirebilirsiniz. Bu bazen ateşle çalışan bir balona, hidrojenle çalışan bir balonu bağlamanın şu ilk denemesinde olduğu gibi bir şeydir; yere çakılıp yanmayı mı yeğlersiniz yoksa yanıp yere çakılmayı mı? Ama bazen de deneme başarılır ve yeni bir şey yaratılır dünya değişir.

Está la cuestión de la soledad. Pero no es como te la imaginas (si alguna vez has intentado imaginarla). Hay dos tipos de soledad esenciales: la de quienes no han encontrado a nadie a quien amar, y la de quienes se han visto privados del ser amado. El primero es el peor. Nada es comparable a la soledad del alma en la adolescencia

How could I possibly be a better person without her than with her? Later, I thought: but he is just echoing Nietzsche's line about what doesn't kill us making us stronger. And as it happens, I have long considered this epigram particularly specious. There are many things that fail to kill us but weaken us for ever. Look around at those emotionally damaged by mere ordinary life.

Ich glaube nicht, dass ich sie je wiedersehen werde. Ich werde sie nie wieder sehen, hören, berühren, in den Armen halten, ihr zuhören, mit ihr lachen; nie wieder auf ihre Schritte horchen, lächeln, wenn eine Tür aufgeht; nie wieder ihren Körper an meinen, meinen an ihren drücken. Ich glaube auch nicht, dass wir uns in entmaterialisierter Form wiedertreffen. Ich glaube, tot ist tot.

This is true, and defines the lostness of the grief struck. You constantly report things, so that the loved one 'knows'. You may be aware that you are fooling yourself (though, if aware, are at the same time not fooling yourself), yet you continue. And everything you do, or might achieve thereafter, is thinner, weaker, matters less. There is no echo coming back; no texture, no resonance, no depth of field.

When we killed - or exiled - God we also killed ourselves. Did we notice sufficiently at the time? No God, no afterlife, no us. We were right to kill Him, of course, this long-standing imaginary friend of ours. And we weren't going to get an afterlife anyway. But we sawed off the branch we were sitting on. And the view from there, from that height - even if it was only the illusion of a view - wasn't so bad.

Es menos el recuerdo de un suceso que el recuerdo de una fotografía del suceso. Y hoy día, como hemos perdido altura, precisión, foco, ya no confiamos tanto en la fotografía como en otra época. Las viejas instantáneas de tiempos más felices parecen haberse vuelto menos primarias, menos fotografías de la vida misma y más fotografías de fotografías. O, dicho de otro modo, tu recuerdo de tu vida —tu vida anterior

Love may not lead where we think or hope, but regardless of outcome it should be a call to seriousness and truth. If it is not that—if it is not moral in its effect—then love is no more than an exaggerated form of pleasure. Whereas grief, love’s opposite, does not seem to occupy a moral space. The defensive, curled position it forces us into if we are to survive makes us more selfish. It is not a place of upper air; there are no views. You can no longer hear yourself living.

Love may not lead where we think or hope, but regardless of outcome it should be a call to seriousness and truth. If it is not that – if it is not moral in its effect – then love is no more than an exaggerated form of pleasure. Whereas grief, love’s opposite, does not seem to occupy a moral space. The defensive, curled position it forces us into if we are to survive makes us more selfish. It is not a place of upper air; there are no views. You can no longer hear yourself living.

Juntas a dos personas que nunca habían estado juntas. A veces es como aquel primer intento de acoplar un globo de hidrógeno a otro de aire caliente: ¿prefieres estrellarte y arder o arder y estrellarte? Pero a veces funciona y se crea algo nuevo y el mundo cambia. Después, tarde o temprano, en algún momento, por una razón u otra, una de las dos desaparece. Y lo que desaparece es mayor que la suma de lo que había. Esto es quizá matemáticamente imposible, pero es emocionalmente posible.

Es stimmt schon, mein Leid gilt zum Teil mir selbst – seht mal, was ich verloren habe, seht, wie mein Leben reduziert wurde –, aber es gilt noch mehr, viel mehr, und das von Anfang an, ihr: Seht doch, was SIE verloren hat, da sie jetzt das Leben verloren hat. Ihren Körper, ihren Geist, ihre strahlende Neugier auf das Leben. Manchmal fühlt es sich an, als habe das Leben selbst am meisten verloren, sei im wahrsten Sinne beraubt worden, weil es ihrer strahlenden Neugier nicht mehr ausgesetzt ist.

دو تا آدم را که تا به حال کنار هم قرار نگرفته‌اند کنار هم بگذارید. بعضی وقت‌ها مثل اولین باری می‌شود که سعی کردند بالونی هیدروژنی را به بالون هوای گرم ببندند: ترجیح می‌دهید اول بسوزید و بعد زمین بیفتید، یا اول عشق زمین‌تان بزند و بعداً شما را بسوزاند؟ گاهی شدنی است و یک چیز تازه درست می‌شود و دنیا عوض می‌شود. بعدش، یک وقتی، دیر یا زود،‌ به خاطر فلان یا بهمان علت،‌ یکی از آن دو نفر کم می‌شود. و چیزی که کسر شده بیشتر است از مجموع آنچه که بوده است. از نظر ریاضی احتمالاً ممکن نیست، اما از نظر احساسی چرا.

And now he realised that if he had asked her, she would have replied, ‘I shall love you for as long as I shall love you.’ What lover could ask for more? And the prompter’s voice would again have whispered, ‘Which means for ever.’ Such was the measure of a man’s vanity. Was their love, then, merely the construction of his fancy? That he could not, did not believe. He had loved her as much as he was able for three months, and she had done the same; it was just that her love had a timing switch built into it.

So. I see where you're going—bus number 27 to a crossroads near Delphi. Look, I did not want, at any point, on any level, to kill my own father and sleep with my own mother. It's true that I wanted to sleep with Susan—and did so many times—and for a number of years thought of killing Gordon Macleod, but that is another part of the story. Not to put too fine a point on it, I think the Oedipus myth is precisely what it started off as: melodrama rather than psychology. In all my years of life I've never met anyone to whom it might apply. You think I'm being naive? You wish to point out that human motivation is deviously buried, and hides its mysterious workings from those who blindly submit to it? Perhaps so. But even—especially—Oedipus didn't want to kill his father and sleep with his mother, did he? Oh yes he did! Oh no he didn't! Yes, let's just leave it as a pantomime exchange.

But – I am not made for happiness.’ ‘You cannot say, after these last weeks and months …’ ‘Oh, but I can say. And I do. I am made for sensation, for pleasure, for the moment. I am constantly in search of new sensations, new emotions. That is how I shall be until my life is worn away. My heart desires more excitement than anyone – any one person – can give.’ He looked away from her. This was more than a man could bear. ‘You must understand this,’ she went on. ‘I shall never marry. I promise you that. I shall always be, as you put it, a balloonatic. I shall never take that heavier-than-air machine with anyone. What can I do? You must not be angry with me. You must think of me as an incomplete person.’ He summoned up one last attempt. ‘Madame Sarah, we are all of us incomplete. I am just as incomplete as you. That is why we seek another person. For completion. And I too have never thought I would marry. Not because it is the conventional thing to do. But because I previously did not have the courage. Marriage is a greater danger than a pack of infidels with spears, if you want my opinion. Do not be afraid, Madame Sarah. Do not let your actions be governed by your fears. That is what my first commanding officer used to tell me.’ ‘It is not fear, Capitaine Fred,’ she said gently. ‘It is self-knowledge. And do not be angry with me.’ ‘I am not angry. You have a manner which quite disarms anger. If I appear angry, it is because I am angry with the universe that has made you, that has made us, so that this … so that this is how.