The Sense Of An Ending Quotes
"This last isn’t something I actually saw, but what you end up remembering isn’t always the same as what you have witnessed."
"We live in time—it holds us and moulds us—but I’ve never felt I understood it very well."
"Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing—until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return."
"His name was Adrian Finn, a tall, shy boy who initially kept his eyes down and his mind to himself."
"I just thought it was a poem about a barn owl, sir."
"We were essentially taking the piss, except when we were serious."
"He gave the impression that he believed in things."
"History is the lies of the victors, as well as the self-delusions of the defeated."
"You don’t actually need me to congratulate you, do you, Anthony?"
"I hate the way the English have of not being serious about being serious. I really hate it."
"Isn’t there something between stagnation and heading somewhere? Like having a nice time. Enjoy the day and all that?"
"You keep asking me questions as if you know the answer to them."
"I don’t want to give the impression that all I did at Bristol was work and see Veronica."
"Nature being violent and destructive, putting us in our place."
"It was more unsettling because it looked and felt quietly wrong, as if some small lever of the universe had been pressed."
"You’ve got to hold on to it as you pull out."
"You were always asking me to think about our relationship and so now perhaps I have."
"Life seemed even more of a guessing game than usual."
"The times we did, I would be hit by a sense of what I can only call pre-guilt."
"We live with such easy assumptions, don’t we? For instance, that memory equals events plus time."
"But then you begin to understand that the reward of merit is not life’s business."
"Discovering, for example, that as the witnesses to your life diminish, there is less corroboration, and therefore less certainty, as to what you are or have been."
"He survived to tell the tale—that’s what people say, don’t they?"
"The less time there remains in your life, the less you want to waste it."
"Have you noticed how, when you talk to someone like a solicitor, after a while you stop sounding like yourself and end up sounding like them?"
"People shouldn’t read other people’s diaries."
"It strikes me that this may be one of the differences between youth and age: when we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old, we invent different pasts for others."
"How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts?"
"But time... how time first grounds us and then confounds us. We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe."
"How few of us—we that remain—can say that we have done the same? We muddle along, we let life happen to us, we gradually build up a store of memories."
"For instance: that when we are young and sensitive, we are also at our most hurtful; whereas when the blood begins to slow, when we feel less sharply, when we are more armoured and have learnt how to bear hurt, we tread more carefully."
"It wasn’t shame I now felt, or guilt, but something rarer in my life and stronger than both: remorse."
"In Adrian’s terms, I gave up on life, gave up on examining it, took it as it came."
"The word resounded. Average at life; average at truth; morally average."
"I had wanted life not to bother me too much, and had succeeded—and how pitiful that was."
"Not that this brought any comfort. The word resounded. Average at life; average at truth; morally average."
"You’re not still in love with the Fruitcake. No, I don’t think I am."
"Did you leave me because of me? No, I left you because of us."
"Life isn’t just addition and subtraction. There’s also the accumulation, the multiplication, of loss, of failure."
"Start with the notion that yours is the sole responsibility unless there’s powerful evidence to the contrary."
"Sometimes I think the purpose of life is to reconcile us to its eventual loss by wearing us down, by proving, however long it takes, that life isn’t all it’s cracked up to be."
"Old fool, I said to myself. And there’s no fool like an old fool."
"Who was it said that the longer we live, the less we understand?"
"Remorse, etymologically, is the action of biting again: that’s what the feeling does to you."
"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.'"
"There is accumulation. There is responsibility. And beyond these, there is unrest. There is great unrest."