Quotes from Flaubert's Parrot

“Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't. I'm not surprised some people prefer books.”
― Julian Barnes, quote from Flaubert's Parrot

“Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't. I'm not surprised some people prefer books. Books make sense of life. The only problem is that the lives they make sense of are other people's lives, never your own.”
― Julian Barnes, quote from Flaubert's Parrot

“Women scheme when they are weak, they lie out of fear. Men scheme when they are strong, they lie out of arrogance.”
― Julian Barnes, quote from Flaubert's Parrot

“To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness - though if stupidity is lacking, the others are useless.”
― Julian Barnes, quote from Flaubert's Parrot

“The greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonorably, foolishly, viciously.”
― Julian Barnes, quote from Flaubert's Parrot

“(on grief) And you do come out of it, that’s true. After a year, after five. 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.”
― Julian Barnes, quote from Flaubert's Parrot

“He feared me as many men fear women: because their mistresses (or their wives) understand them. They are scarcely adult, some men: they wish women to understand them, and to that end they tell them all their secrets; and then, when they are properly understood, they hate their women for understanding them.”
― Julian Barnes, quote from Flaubert's Parrot

“The writer must be universal in sympathy and an outcast by nature: only then can he see clearly.”
― Julian Barnes, quote from Flaubert's Parrot

“A pier is a disappointed bridge; yet stare at it for long enough and you can dream it to the other side of the Channel.”
― Julian Barnes, quote from Flaubert's Parrot

“When you’re young you prefer the vulgar months, the fullness of the seasons. As you grow older you learn to like the in-between times, the months that can’t make up their minds. Perhaps it’s a way of admitting that things can’t ever bear the same certainty again.”
― Julian Barnes, quote from Flaubert's Parrot

“Mystification is simple; clarity is the hardest thing of all.”
― Julian Barnes, quote from Flaubert's Parrot

“He didn’t really like travel, of course. He liked the idea of travel, and the memory of travel, but not travel itself.”
― Julian Barnes, quote from Flaubert's Parrot

“Everything you invent is true: you can be sure of that. Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.”
― Julian Barnes, quote from Flaubert's Parrot

“Life … is a bit like reading. … If all your responses to a book have already been duplicated and expanded upon by a professional critic, then what point is there to your reading? Only that it’s yours. Similarly, why live your life? Because it’s yours. But what if such an answer becomes less and less convincing?”
― Julian Barnes, quote from Flaubert's Parrot

“Pride makes us long for a solution to things – a solution, a purpose, a final cause; but the better telescopes become, the more stars appear.”
― Julian Barnes, quote from Flaubert's Parrot

“Loving humanity means as much, and as little, as loving raindrops, or loving the Milky Way. You say that you love humanity? Are you sure you aren’t treating yourself to easy self-congratulation, seeking approval, making certain you’re on the right side?”
― Julian Barnes, quote from Flaubert's Parrot

“[Flaubert] didn’t just hate the railway as such; he hated the way it flattered people with the illusion of progress. What was the point of scientific advance without moral advance? The railway would merely permit more people to move about, meet and be stupid together.”
― Julian Barnes, quote from Flaubert's Parrot

“It's easy, after all, not to be a writer. Most people aren't writers, and very little harm comes to them.”
― Julian Barnes, quote from Flaubert's Parrot

“The best life for a writer is the life which helps him write the best books he can.”
― Julian Barnes, quote from Flaubert's Parrot

“WHORES.
Necessary in the nineteenth century for the contraction of syphilis, without which no one could claim genius.”
― Julian Barnes, quote from Flaubert's Parrot

“Irony - The modern mode: either the devil’s mark or the snorkel of sanity.”
― Julian Barnes, quote from Flaubert's Parrot

“Remember the botched brothel-visit in L’Education sentimentale and remember its lesson. Do not participate: happiness lies in the imagination, not the act. Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory.”
― Julian Barnes, quote from Flaubert's Parrot

“You can define a net two ways, depending on your point of view. Normally you would say it is a meshed instrument designed to catch fish. But you could, with no great injury to logic, reverse the image and define the net as a jocular lexicographer once did: he called it a collection of holes tied together with string.”
― Julian Barnes, quote from Flaubert's Parrot

“If the writer were more like a reader, he’d be a reader, not a writer. It’s as uncomplicated as that.”
― Julian Barnes, quote from Flaubert's Parrot

“His air of failure had nothing desperate about it; rather, it seemed to stem from an unresented realisation that he was not cut out for success, and his duty was therefore to ensure only that he failed in the correct and acceptable fashion.”
― Julian Barnes, quote from Flaubert's Parrot

“What makes us want to know the worst? Is it that we tire of preferring to know the best? Does curiosity always hurdle self-interest? Or is it, more simply, that wanting to know the worst is love’s favourite perversion? … I loved Ellen, and i wanted to know the worst. I never provoked her; I was cautious and defensive, as is my habit; I didn’t even ask questions; but I wanted to know the worst. Ellen never returned this caress. She was fond of me - she would automatically agree, as if the matter weren’t worth of discussing, that she loved me - but she unquestioningly believed the best about me. That’s the difference. She didn’t ever search for that sliding panel which opens the secret chamber of the heart, the chamber where the memory and corpses are kept. Sometimes you find the panel but it doesn’t open; sometimes it opens, and your gaze meets nothing but a mouse skeleton. But at least you’ve looked. That’s the real distinction between people: not between those who have secrets and those who don’t, but between those who want to know everything and those who don’t. This search is a sign of love, I maintain.”
― Julian Barnes, quote from Flaubert's Parrot

“When you are young, you think that the old lament the deterioration of life because this makes it easier for them to die without regret. When you are old, you become impatient with the way in which the young applaud the most insignificant improvements … while remaining heedless of the world’s barbarism. I don’t say things have got worse; I merely say the young wouldn’t notice if they had. The old times were good because then we were young, and ignorant of how ignorant the young can be.”
― Julian Barnes, quote from Flaubert's Parrot

“Everything in art depends on execution: the story of a louse can be as beautiful as the story of Alexander. You must write according to your feelings, be sure those feelings are true, and let everything else go hang. When a line is good it ceases to belong to any school. A line of prose must be as immutable as a line of poetry.”
― Julian Barnes, quote from Flaubert's Parrot

“When I was still quite young I had a complete presentiment of life. It was like the nauseating smell of cooking escaping from a ventilator: you don't have to have eaten it to know that it would make you throw up. ”
― Julian Barnes, quote from Flaubert's Parrot

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Popular quotes

“Where are we going, love?”
“We?” Her eyes are darker – dilated, and her chest rises and falls in quick, excited pants. I wonder if she even realizes it. “I have a meeting. Mother’s sent her car to take me. You can’t come, Henry.”
“I can come lots of times. My stamina is legendary. Do you want me to show you?”
Her voice comes out soft, husky. “You can’t come with me”
“That sounds like a challenge.” I smirk slowly. “I bet I could time it just right.”
― Emma Chase, quote from Royally Matched

“I don't do that kind of negativity. If you put your energy into thinking about how much the fall would hurt, you're already halfway down.”
― Tana French, quote from Broken Harbor

“The quickest way to a man`s heart,' said the instructor, 'is proverbially through his stomach. But if you want to get into his brain, I recommend the eye-socket.”
― K.J. Parker, quote from Devices and Desires

“People in Japan and the Faeroe Islands kill dolphins and pilot whales by running steel rods into their spinal columns while they squeal in pain and terror and thrash in agony. (In Japan, it’s illegal to kill cows and pigs as painfully and inhumanely as they kill dolphins.) The lack of compassion for dolphins and whales indicates that humans’ “theory of mind” is incomplete. We have an empathy shortfall, a compassion deficit. And human-on-human violence, abuse, and ethnic and religious genocide are all too pervasive in our world. No elephant will ever pilot a jetliner. And no elephant will ever pilot a jetliner into the World Trade Center. We have the capacity for wider compassion, but we don’t fully live up to ourselves. Why do human egos seem so threatened by the thought that other animals think and feel? Is it because acknowledging the mind of another makes it harder to abuse them? We seem so unfinished and so defensive. Maybe incompleteness is one of the things that “makes us human.”
― Carl Safina, quote from Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel

“Fleurs du mal,” Eve heard herself saying, and shivered. “What?” “Baudelaire. We are not flowers to be plucked and shielded, Captain. We are flowers who flourish in evil.”
― Kate Quinn, quote from The Alice Network

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BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

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