Best 59 quotes of Anita Brookner on MyQuotes

Accountability in friendship is the equivalent of love without strategy.

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.

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.

Always let them think of you as singing and dancing.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

It is best to marry for purely selfish reasons.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Satire is dependent on strong beliefs, and on strong beliefs wounded.

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

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

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.

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

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.

The self-fulfilled woman is far from reality.

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

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

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

Writing has freed me from the despair of living.

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

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.

You can never betray the people who are dead.

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.

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.

And without understanding, could each properly love the other?

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.

[…] 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.

...but you’ve been a fool. Some women take advantage. Once they’re married, and they’ve got a good husband, they think they can do what they like. And if they take him for granted-” she paused significantly- “they just don’t bother anymore.

In old prints melancholy is usually portrayed as a woman, disheveled, deranged, surrounded by broken pitchers, leaning casks, torn books. She may be sunk in unpeaceful sleep, heavy limbed, overpowered by her inability to take the world's measure, her compass and book laid aside. She is very frightening, but the person she frightens most is herself. She is her own disease. Miter shows her wearing a large ungainly dress, winged, a garland in her tangled hair. She has a fierce frown and so great is her disarray that she is closed in by emblems of study, duty, and suffering: a bell, an hourglass, a pair of scales, a globe, a compass, a ladder, nails. Sometimes this woman is shown surrounded by encroaching weeds, a conweb undisturbed above her head. Sometimes she gazes out of the window at a full moon for she is moonstruck. And should melancholy strike a man it will because he is suffering from romantic love: he will lean his padded satin arm on a velvet cushion and gaze skywards under the nodding plume of his hat, or he will grasp a thorn or a nettle and indicate that he does not sleep. These men seem to me to be striking a bit of a pose, unlike women, whose melancholy is less picturesque. The women look as if they are in the grip of an affliction too serious to be put into words. The men, on the other hand, appear to have dressed up for the occasion, and are anxious to put a noble face on their suffering. Which shows that nothing much has changed since the sixteenth century at least in that respect.

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.

It is not true that Satan makes work for idle hands to do; that is just what he doesn't. Satan should be at hand with all manner of glittering distractions, false but irresistible promises, inducements to reprehensible behaviour. Instead of which one is simply offered a choice between overwork and half-hearted idleness.

Love imposes obligations and these are constant. An intermittent lover is no use to a person of dignity and courage.