Anita Brookner Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

[...] death is only a small interruption. — 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

I reflected how easy it is for a man to reduce women of a certain age to imbecility. All he has to do is give an impersonation of desire, or better still, of secret knowledge, for a woman to feel herself a source of power. — Anita Brookner

I've never got on very well with Jane Austen. — Anita Brookner

I was a teacher most of my life, which I loved. I had a very happy working life, and when I retired, I thought I must do something, and I've always read a lot of fiction - you learn so much from fiction. My sentimental education came mostly from fiction, I should say, so I thought I'd try. — Anita Brookner

Women share their sadness, thought Edith. Their joy they like to show off to one another. Victory, triumph over the odds, calls for an audience. And that air of bustle and exigence sometimes affected by the sexually loquacious - that is for the benefit of other women. No solidarity then. — Anita Brookner

Fiction, the time-honoured resource of the ill-at-ease, would have to come to her aid, — Anita Brookner

I could not, somehow, make contact with any familiar emotion. As I lingered in front of a lighted window, apparently beguiled by a pair of burgundy leather shoes, I could only identify a feeling of exclusion. I felt as if the laws of the universe no longer applied to me, since I was outside the normal frames of reference. A biological nonentity, to be phased out. And somewhere, intruding helplessly and to no avail into my consciousness, the anger of the underdog, plotting bloody revolution, plotting revenge. — Anita Brookner

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

The trouble with good manners is that people are persuaded that you are all right, require no protection, are perfectly capable of looking after yourself. — Anita Brookner

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

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

We shall none of us ever make love again, she thought, and did not much care. Life had not been too harsh; the sea would still be there at the end. She was nearly ready. — Anita Brookner

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

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

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

I'm not very popular, because they're bleak and they're mournful and all the rest of it and I get censorious reviews. But I'm only writing fiction. I'm not making munitions, so I think it's acceptable. — Anita Brookner

Not everyone is born to fulfill an heroic role. The only realistic ambition is to live in the present. And sometimes, quite often in fact, this is more than enough to keep one busy. Time, which was once squandered, must now be given over to the actual, the possible, and perhaps that evanescent hope of a good outcome which never deserts one, and which should never be abandoned. — Anita Brookner

I reminded myself of someone, but someone I had not seen for a long time. — Anita Brookner

I'm a middle-class, middle-brow novelist. And that's it. It amuses me. — Anita Brookner

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

[...] no man is free of his own history. — Anita Brookner

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

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

Of course, the spectacle of two people's happiness is always something of a magnet for the unclaimed. — Anita Brookner

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

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

Hartmann had the ideas and Fibich did the worrying: it suited them both perfectly. — 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 Brookner

They had waited for too long, and the result was this hiatus, and the reflection that time and patience may bring poor rewards, that time itself, if not confronted at the appropriate juncture, can play sly tricks, and more significantly, that those who do not act are not infrequently acted upon. — Anita Brookner

Hotel Du Lac
Edith, once again anonymous, and accepting her anonymity, made an appropriately inconspicuous exit. And, sitting in the deserted salon, the first to arrive from the dining room, she felt her precarious dignity hard-pressed and about to succumb in the light of her earlier sadness. The pianist, sitting down to play, gave her a brief nod. She nodded back, and thought how limited her means of expression had become: nodding to the pianist or to Mme de Bonneuil, listening to Mrs Pusey, using a disguised voice in the novel she was writing and, with all of this, waiting for a voice that remained silent, hearing very little that meant anything to her at all. The dread implications of this condition made her blink her eyes and vow to be brave, to do better, not to give way. But it was not easy. — Anita Brookner

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

My idea of absolute happiness is to sit in a hot garden all, reading, or writing, utterly safe in the knowledge that the person I love will come home to me in the evening. Every evening.'
'You are a romantic, Edith,' repeated Mr Neville, with a smile.
'It is you who are wrong,' she replied. 'I have been listening to that particular accusation for most of my life. 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

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

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

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

That instant proved to me that it was not the first, almost unemotional, sighting of a potential lover that was significant, but the second, the moment not of recognition but of confirmation, so that every other consideration is irrelevant, as if it might have mattered at some point in the past but no longer had any currency in the charged wordless exchange that seals the matter for ever, regardless of the dangers thus incurred and whatever the cost. — Anita Brookner

Old men should have more care to end life well than to live long. — Anita Brookner

In real life, of course, it is the hare that wins. Every time. Look around you. — Anita Brookner

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

It is my contention that Aesop was writing for the tortoise market. hares have no time to read. — Anita Brookner

It was then that I saw the business of writing for what it truly was and is to me. It is your penance for not being lucky. It is an attempt to reach others and to make them love you. It is your instinctive protest, when you find you have no voice at the world's tribunals, and that no one will speak for you. I would give my entire output of words, past, present and to come, in exchange for easier access to the world, for permission to state "I hurt" or " I hate" or " I want". Or indeed, "Look at me". And I do not go back on this. For once a thing is known it can never be unknown. It can only be forgotten. And writing is the enemy of forgetfulness, or thoughtlessness. For the writer there is no oblivion. Only endless memory. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If I were happy, married with six children, I wouldn't be writing. And I doubt if I should want to. — Anita Brookner

Old times, sad times. I feel better about them now than I did then. — Anita Brookner

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

But it was a significant exercise, for it meant that I considered myself worthy, as I had never done before. That change in my consciousness was so bewildering that I looked back on my previous life with a sort of amazed pity. That narrowness, those scruples, that prolonged childhood ... I even, and this is a great test, began to consider journeys I might make, for my own pleasure, without him. I had never been to Greece and I thought I might go now, some time soon. And I knew that if I went I should enjoy it, as I had never enjoyed a journey before. Because I should have James to come back to. By the very fact of his existence, he had given the validity to my entire future. — Anita Brookner

The self-fulfilled woman is far from reality. — Anita Brookner

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

[ ... ] as if the next thing must quickly come along to occupy her, or the abyss might open. What abyss? The abyss that waits for all of us, when all our actions seem futile, when the ability to fill the day seems stalled, and the waiting takes on an edge of dread. — 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

As a devil's advocate Mr Neville was faultless. And yet, she knew, there was a flaw in his reasoning, just as there was a flaw in his ability to feel. — Anita Brookner

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

People say that I am always serious and depressing, but it seems to me that the English are never serious - they are flippant, complacent, ineffable, but never serious, which is sometimes maddening. — Anita Brookner

I think that those few words were my greatest mistake. — Anita Brookner

Fortunately, common sense asserted itself and I vowed that I should never wait for anyone again. — Anita Brookner

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

Literature for me was a magnificent destiny for which I was not yet fully prepared. 76 — Anita Brookner

You get a lot of borderline cases in libraries. — Anita Brookner

Boundaries keep people out; mine served only to keep me in. — Anita Brookner

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

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

When you make a break for freedom you don't necessarily find company on the way. — Anita Brookner

I was brought up to look after my parents. My family were Polish Jews, and we lived with my grandmother, with uncles and aunts and cousins all around, and I thought everybody lived like that. — Anita Brookner

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

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

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

I never learnt Hebrew because my health was fragile, and it was thought that learning Hebrew would be an added burden. I regret it, because I would like to be able to join in fully. Not that I am a believer, but I would like to be. — Anita Brookner

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

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

[ ... ] nobody grows up. Everyone carries around all the selves that they have ever been, intact, waiting to be reactivated in moments of pain, of fear, of danger. Everything is retrievable, every shock, every hurt. But perhaps it becomes a duty to abandon the stock of time that one carries within oneself, to discard it in favour of the present, so that one's embrace may be turned outwards to the world in which one has made one's home. — Anita Brookner

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

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

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