Barnes Quotes & Sayings

Now I see that night does something to a person's identity, even when asleep. — Djuna Barnes

I guess when life hands you lemons, chop 'em up and get lemonade; when life hands you cats, chop 'em up and get pussy. — John Barnes

I left my Phillie at home, Do you have another? I wanna get blunted, my brother. — Daryl Barnes

We are all one - or at least we should be - and it is our job, our duty, and our great challenge to fight the voices of division and seek the salve of reconciliation. — Roy Barnes

I had my knife in hand before I realized I'd reached for it and had kicked open the ... front door before it ever occurred to me that it might have already been unlocked. — Jennifer Lynn Barnes

The beautiful in nature is the unmarred result of God's first creative or forming will,and ..the beautiful in art is the result of an unmistaken working of man in accordance with the beautiful in nature. — William Barnes

Acquiring the trick of listening to birds will teach you how better to enjoy life and how better to endure it — Simon Barnes

Let me be candid. If I had to rank book-acquisition experiences in order of comfort, ease, and satisfaction, the list would go like this: 1. The perfect independent bookstore, like Pygmalion in Berkeley. 2. A big, bright Barnes & Noble. I know they're corporate, but let's face it - those stores are nice. Especially the ones with big couches. 3. The book aisle at Walmart. (It's next to the potting soil.) 4. The lending library aboard the U.S.S. West Virginia, a nuclear submarine deep beneath the surface of the Pacific. 5. Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore. — Robin Sloan

For a few seconds, I thought I might actually cry. That was so unlike me, I wasn't sure how to respond. Bronwyn Alessia St. Vincent Clare didn't get sad. She got mad. Or better, she got even. — Jennifer Lynn Barnes

A week is a long time in politics, and three weeks is twice as long. — Rosie Barnes

Discovering, for example, that as witnesses to your life diminish, there is less corroboration, and therefore less certainty, as to what you are or have been. [p. 65] — Julian Barnes

Women scheme when they are weak, they lie out of fear. Men scheme when they are strong, they lie out of arrogance. — Julian Barnes

The best life for a writer is the life which helps him write the best books he can. — Julian Barnes

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. — Julian Barnes

Posterity will jump to conclusions: that is its nature. — Julian Barnes

We all use the ahmsah to perceive and influence the ahm, the tidal flow of disentropy that flows across the ahmtesh. Our Esoteric Doctrine articulates how we perceive and stimulate natural energy to supernatural ends. Over — Mark T. Barnes

Writers of either gender ought to be able to do the opposite sex-that's one basic test of competence, after all. — Julian Barnes

Casey doesn't trust him."
"Casey doesn't trust anyone," I replied. "He's paranoid like that. I mean, come on, he's a werewolf who installed a nanny cam in his kids' room." I pointed my spoon at Ali for emphasis. "A nanny cam. — Jennifer Lynn Barnes

I'm not telling you what to do, I'm just telling you what you're going to do. There's a difference. — Jennifer Lynn Barnes

Theories were clean and convincing and comprehensible. Life was messy and full of nonsense. — Julian Barnes

I smiled half a smile at her puppy antics, wondering what it would be like to be able to join her, to shed my human skin and the confines that went with it and just live in the moment as a wolf. What would I look like with four legs and fur - would I be light-colored like Katie, or a darker timber, like Dev? I wondered if I would be velvet black with ice-blue eyes, like Chase. — Jennifer Lynn Barnes

Yeah..so this one time I got kicked out of Barnes and Noble for putting all their Bibles in the fiction section. — Corey

Do we tend to recall the most important parts of a novel or those that speak most directly to us, the truest lines or the flashiest ones? — Julian Barnes

I say this with no fear of contradiction. Jonas Barnes is absolutely, positively the funniest stand-up comic I have ever seen. Of course, I almost never leave my home. Jonas is a great guy and was a big help to me. — Danny Bonaduce

Who was it said that the longer we live, the less we understand? — Julian Barnes

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. — Julian Barnes

A five-minute teacher understands that peers' words can carry a lot more weight than his or her own, and there is nothing wrong with students doing the teaching. — Mark Barnes

I blushed. You haven't seen a bald man in his sixties blush? Oh, it happens, just as it does to a hairy, spotty fifteen-year-old. And because it's rarer, it sends the blusher tumbling back to that time when life felt like nothing more than one long sequence of embarrassments. — Julian Barnes

Most of the time, it felt like my father and I were completely different species. Possibly literally, depending on the day and whether or not I actually qualified as human at the time. — Jennifer Lynn Barnes

Apart from these parental physical jerks, he did not train his body; he merely inhabited it. A friend had once shown what he called gymnastics for the intelligentsia. You took a box of matches and threw its contents on the floor, then bent down and picked them up, one by one. The first time he tried it himself, he lost patience and stuffed all the matches back in handfuls. He persevered, but the next time, just as he was bending down, the telephone went, and he was needed at once; so the housekeeper was detailed to pick up the matches instead. — Julian Barnes

If you saved yourself, you might also save those around you, those you loved. And since you would do anything in the world to save those you loved, you did anything in the world to save yourself. And because there was no choice, equally there was no possibility of avoiding moral corruption. - — Julian Barnes

My name is Stuart, and I remember everything. — Julian Barnes

We're trying to publicize this one and make people realize that the gun industry can clean up its act and can operate in a way that can reduce the likelihood of guns killing police officers and other innocent people. — Michael D. Barnes

The people ... they are church-broken, nation-broken
they drink and pray and piss in the one place. Every man has a house-broken heart except the great man. The people love their church and know it, as a dog knows where he was made to conform, and there he returns by his instinct. — Djuna Barnes

Without even thinking about it, I sent Callum an image of a dog hiking his leg at a fire hydrant. And then one of a rebel flag from the Revolutionary War.
Callum didn't respond in my head, but I knew he'd gotten the message, because he met me at the front door, and the first thing he said, with a single arch of his eyebrow, was, "Don't tread on you?"
"More like 'don't metaphorically pee on my brainwaves,' but it's the same sentiment, really."
"Vulgarity does not become you, Bryn."
"Are you going to lecture, or are we going to run?"
He sighed, but I didn't need a bond with the pack to see that he was thinking that I had always, always been a difficult child. And then, just in case that point wasn't clear, he verbalized it. "You have always, always been a difficult child."
I smiled sweetly. "I try. — Jennifer Lynn Barnes

Repeating a grade needs to be the last resort, not an automatic response to a child who is struggling to learn. — Roy Barnes

Darkness is the natural state of the universe. Light, fleeting, comforting as it may be, may stretch to the very edges of all we know. Yet once it is gone, the darkness always remains. — Mark T. Barnes

Harper Johnson looked down at the woman bleeding on the floor. He drew a line through the first name on his list of three with a pen. The ink was red and the tip was broken, so it bled unevenly as he ran it through the letters. — Elin Barnes

Ronald Reagan has a story for every occasion. Bill Clinton has an excuse for every occasion. — Fred Barnes

There goes the dismantled - Love has fallen off her wall. A religious woman," he thought to himself, "without the joy and safety of the Catholic faith, which at a pinch covers up the spots on the wall when the family portraits take a slide; take that safety from a woman," he said to himself, quickening his step to follow her, "and love gets loose and into the rafters. She sees her everywhere," he added, glancing at Nora as she passed into the dark. "Out looking for what she's afraid to find - Robin. There goes mother of mischief, running about, trying to get the world home. — Djuna Barnes

Tallyho, friends of Asher!" Asher had impeccable timing. He waltzed into the room and hopped up on the computer table, his legs dangling down, like he didn't have a care in the world. Like the tension in the room wasn't thick enough that you could have cut it with a knife. "Am I interrupting something?" he asked blithely. Just Henry telling me he thinks my sister might be working to cover up his grandfather's murder. Henry must have read something in my expression, because a hint of remorse flashed across his features. — Jennifer Lynn Barnes

You got your cheese, I hope? You won't mind a word of advice? Eat it. Don't put it in a plastic bag in the fridge and save it for visitors; before you know where you are it'll have swollen to three times its size and smell like a chemical factory. You'll open the bag and be putting your face into a bad marriage. — Julian Barnes

In Jewish folk music, despair is disguised as the dance. And so, truth's disguise was irony. — Julian Barnes

If asked in a court of law what happened and what was said, I could only attest to the words "heading," "stagnating" and "peaceable." I'd never thought of myself as peaceable - or its opposite - until then. I would also swear to the truth of the biscuit tin; it was burgundy red, with the Queen's smiling profile on it. — Julian Barnes

When you have a choice, choose happy! — Pancho Barnes

When I was at school, I was in choirs more than anything else, from a very young age, about 9 years old. And then I started taking drum lessons. — Ben Barnes

Record company execs eat their young, I swear to God. — Linda Barnes

... The other half wanted to say, I love you, come away with me, sit on my knee, I'll always remember you. You so full of your past, me so full of my future. — Julian Barnes

If I hadn't decided on cremation and a scattering, I could have used the phrase as an epitaph on a chunk of stone or marble: "Tony Webster - He Never Got It." But that would be too melodramatic, even self-pitying. How about "He's on His Own Now"? That would be better, truer. Or maybe I'll stick with: "Every Day Is Sunday. — Julian Barnes

May you be ordinary, as the poet once wished the new-born baby. — Julian Barnes

If a happy ending is what you're after, stop the story where it makes you smile, or cry for laughter. In life, it's the rare sweetness to have tears of joy, or painless endings. People feel. It's what they know, and it's why i write. — Mark T. Barnes

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. — Julian Barnes

Constantly he went back over the evidence of his memories. — Julian Barnes

The traditional dress of the Australian cricketer is the baggy green cap on the head and the chip on the shoulder. Both are ritualistically assumed — Simon Barnes

Firecracker Gale and dandelion Peeta are so different from each other that it's easy to imagine that a girl who would choose Gale is a completely different person than one who would choose Peeta. When people sit around debating who Katniss should choose, maybe what they're really debating actually is her identity - and the romance is just a proxy for that big, hard question about the ever-changing, unaware girl on fire. — Jennifer Lynn Barnes

Certainty always produces questions, uncertainty statements. It is a balancing law of nature. — Djuna Barnes

Like what? The things Literature was all about: love, sex, morality, friendship, happiness, suffering, betrayal, adultery, good and evil, heroes and villains, guilt and innocence, ambition, power, justice, revolution, war, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, the individual against society, success and failure, murder, suicide, death, God. And barn owls. — Julian Barnes

Riches make cowards of us ... — Margaret Ayer Barnes

Young, middle-aged, elderly, old, dead: this was how life conjugated. (No, life was a noun, so this is how life declined. Yes, that was better in any case, life declined. — Julian Barnes

If a man cannot tell what he wants to do, then he must find out what he ought to do. If desire has become complicated, then hold fast to duty. — Julian Barnes

Aldus Barnes, a structural engineer by training and member of the Advanced Geometry Unit (AGU) at Arup, has formed many successful collaborations and earned a prominent place for himself in architecture by adopting the language and skills of architects. "Talk in terms of texture and density, instead of torsion and shear. That way they don't think you are just another nerd," Barnes advises the young members of his team. — Yanni Alexander Loukissas

I still buy books faster than I can read them. But again, this feels completely normal: how weird it would be to have around you only as many books as you have time to read in the rest of your life. — Julian Barnes

All banks should be under government control. Deposits guaranteed, dividends reduced, officials turned into state servants taking their orders from Washington ... — Margaret Ayer Barnes

Let me share some facts with you about the law in most of our country. California is in many ways a little different from the rest of the world, and California has better gun laws than many states, although California's need to be improved. — Michael D. Barnes

History isn't what happened, history is just what historians tell us. — Julian Barnes

The imagination doesn't crop annually like a reliable fruit tree. The writer has to gather whatever's there: sometimes too much, sometimes too little, sometimes nothing at all. And in the years of glut there is always a slatted wooden tray in some cool, dark attic, which the writer nervously visits from time to time; and yes, oh dear, while he's been hard at work downstairs, up in the attic there are puckering skins, warning spots, a sudden brown collapse and the sprouting of snowflakes. What can he do about it? — Julian Barnes

If I had a nickel for every time I almost died, I would have been driving to school in a Ferrari and flying off to Bora-Bora on the weekends. — Jennifer Lynn Barnes

I don't need your permission to search your locker. The headmaster's tone drew my attention back in his direction. This, I inferred from the rise in volume, was supposed to be the voice of authority. If you didn't need my permission, I thought, then why did you ask for it? — Jennifer Lynn Barnes

...is not your hero. He's your god. — Jennifer Lynn Barnes

We can only truly be civilised people when we have regular and meaningful contact with the wild world — Simon Barnes

An element of propaganda, of sales and marketing, always intervened between the inner and the outer person. — Julian Barnes

He had a better mind and a more rigorous temperament than me; he thought logically, and then acted on the conclusion of logical thought. Whereas most of us, I suspect, do the opposite: we make an instinctive decision, then build up an infrastructure of reasoning to justify it. And call the result common sense. — Julian Barnes

Frequently I will end a service of worship in our congregation by saying something like, "Every day this week you have to decide if you want to achieve your life or receive it. If you make achieving your goal, your constant companion will be complaint, because you will never achieve enough. If you make receiving the goal, your constant companion will be gratitude for all that God is achieving in your life." I'm not certain that there are such things as measures of our spirituality, but if there are, then gratitude is probably the best one. It indicates that we are paying attention. — M. Craig Barnes

My brother distrusts the essential truth of memories; I distrust the way we colour them in. We each have our own cheap-mail-order paintbox, and our favourite hues. Thus, I remembered Grandma a few pages ago as "petite and unopinionated". My brother, when consulted, takes out his paintbrush and counterproposes "short and bossy. — Julian Barnes

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. — Julian Barnes

I couldn't ever boil potatoes over the heat of your affection. Your love would never bridge a gap; it wouldn't even fill up the hole that the mice came through ... — Djuna Barnes

I think escapism is very important, certainly in my life. I love nothing more than escaping into the world of a film or a novel. To be involved in creating that for other people is a privilege. — Ben Barnes

Anyway ... she's asleep, turned away from me on her side. The usual stratagems and repositionings have failed to induce narcosis in me, so I decide to settle myself against the soft zigzag of her body. As I move and start to nestle my shin against a calf whose muscles are loosened by sleep, she sense what I'm doing, and without waking reaches up with her left hand and pulls the hair off her shoulders on the top of her head, leaving me her bare nape to nestle in. Each time she does this I feel a shudder of love at the exactness of this sleeping courtesy. My eyes prickle with tears, and I have to stop myself from waking her up to remind her of my love. At that moment, unconsciously, she's touched some secret fulcrum of my feelings for her. — Julian Barnes

Most of us remember adolescence as a kind of double negative: no longer allowed to be children, we are not yet capable of being adults. — Julian Barnes

For all you know, this moment, this second, or the next, or the next, could be your destiny. It's not about having plans. It's about having purpose and being who, not what you want to be. — Jennifer Lynn Barnes

The simple truth - every day is precious. When it's gone, it never comes back to you. — Emilie Barnes

Ah hell. We had more fun in a week than those weenies had in a lifetime. — Pancho Barnes

Grief, like death, is banal and unique. So, a banal comparison. When you change your make of car, you suddenly notice how many other cars of the same sort there are on the road. They register in a way they never did before. When you are widowed, you suddenly notice all the widows and widowers coming towards you. Before, they had been more or less invisible, and they continue to remain so to the other drivers, to the unwidowed. — Julian Barnes

Start with the notion that yours is the sole responsibility unless there's powerful evidence to the contrary — Julian Barnes

You grew old first not in your own eyes, but in other people's eyes; then, slowly, you agreed with their opinion of you. — Julian Barnes

God knows you can have complication and difficulty without any compensating depth or seriousness — Julian Barnes

First let me report that the art in the Barnes Collection has never looked better. My trips to the old Barnes were always amazing, but except on the sunniest days, you could barely see the art. The building always felt pushed beyond its capacity. — Jerry Saltz

How rarely do our emotions meet the object they seem to deserve? How hopelessly we signal; how dark the sky; how big the waves. We are all lost at sea, washed between hope and despair, hailing something that may never come to rescue us. — Julian Barnes

Our bones ache only while the flesh is on them. — Djuna Barnes

The Bible says that the Cross offends. If you are offended, I am doing my job. If you are attracted to Christ, the Spirit is doing his work. - Bruce Barnes — Tim LaHaye

One of the things he had learned in life, and which he hoped he could rely on, was that a greater pain drives out a lesser one. A strained muscle disappears before toothache, toothache disappears before a crushed finger. He hoped - it was his only hope now - that the pain of cancer, the pain of dying , would drive out the pains of love. It did not seem likely. — Julian Barnes

I'm not having much of a life. It's not awful, just ordinary. I am trying to accommodate the memories of the life I had with the life I am now living, and I just can't do it. After being behind the wheel of a Lamborghini going 140 down Sunset Drive at four a.m., it's hard to get up and put on a polyester shirt and sell books at Barnes and Noble. But I'm not ashamed of it. — Robert Goolrick

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

Man's greed to obtain something for nothing has never yet been able to content itself with a moderate profit. — Will C. Barnes

I told Vivvie what the person who'd answered had said, verbatim. — Jennifer Lynn Barnes

The nineteenth-century clergyman William Barnes preferred wheelsaddle to bicycle and folkwain to omnibus. By the same token forceps would be nipperlings, and pathology would be painlore. Some of his new words recalled the language of Old English poetry: he proposed glee-mote in place of concert, and the wonderful cellar-thane instead of butler. — Henry Hitchings

HOPE AND EXPECTATION ARE NOT THE SAME THING, THOUGH BOTH WILL LEAD TO DISAPPOINTMENT. EXIST IN THE MOMENT, ACCEPTING ALL THINGS AS THEY ARE, NOT AS YOU WOULD HAVE THEM BE. — Mark T. Barnes

What I really needed wasn't a dose of school spirit; it was a glass of water, an aspirin the size of my fist, and the answers to the history exam that I hadn't studied for the night before. "As long as I'm dreaming," I muttered, my words lost to the cacophony of the gym, "I'd also like a pony, a convertible, and a couple of friends."
"That's a tall order." I'd known that there were people sitting next to me, but I couldn't begin to imagine how one of them had heard me. I hadn't even heard me. "Would you settle for a piece of gum, an orange Tic Tac, and an introduction the the school slut? — Jennifer Lynn Barnes

People recognize actors that they see regularly, like people they see on the television every week. — Ben Barnes

But I don't remember. I won't remember. Memory is an act of will, and so is forgetting. — Julian Barnes