Quotes by Anita Brookner

“Existentialism is about being a saint without God; being your own hero, without all the sanction and support of religion or society.”

“I was brought up among the sort of self-important women who had a husband as one has an alibi”

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

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

“A man of such obvious and exemplary charm must be a liar.”

“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.”

“Romanticism is not just a mode; it literally eats into every life. Women will never get rid of just waiting for the right man.”

“It is my contention that Aesop was writing for the tortoise market. hares have no time to read.”

“Accountability in friendship is the equivalent of love without strategy.”

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

You are wrong if you think you cannot live without love, Edith.No, I am not, she said, slowly. I cannot live without it. Oh, I do not mean that I go into a decline, develop odd symptoms, become a caricature. I mean something far more serious than that. 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. My idea of absolute happiness is to sit in a hot garden all day, 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.

Boundaries keep people out mine served only to keep me in.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Of course, the spectacle of two peoples happiness is always something of a magnet for the unclaimed.

[…] 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.