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“Everyone has their love story. Everyone. It may have been a fiasco, it may have fizzled out, it may never even have got going, it may have been all in the mind, that doesn't make it any less real. Sometimes, it makes it more real. Sometimes, you see a couple, and they seem bored witless with one another, and you can't imagine them having anything in common, or why they're still living together. But it's not just habit or complacency or convention or anything like that. It's because once, they had their love story. Everyone does. It's the only story.”
― Julian Barnes, The Only Story

“You're still in it. You'll always be in it. No, not literally. But in your heart. Nothing ever ends, not if it's gone that deep. You'll always be walking wounded. That's the only choice, after a while. Walking wounded, or dead. Don't you agree?”
― Julian Barnes, The Only Story

“Though sometimes, first love cauterises the heart, and all any searcher will find thereafter is scar tissue.”
― Julian Barnes, The Only Story

“I think there's a different authenticity to memory, and not an inferior one. Memory sorts and sifts according to the demands made on it by the rememberer.”
― Julian Barnes, The Only Story

“You see—I hope you never get there yourself—but some of us get to the point in life where we realise that nothing matters. Nothing fucking matters.”
― Julian Barnes, The Only Story

“Because once you had been through certain things, their presence inside you never really disappeared.”
― Julian Barnes, The Only Story

“Susan had pointed out that everyone has their love story. Even if it was a fiasco, even if it fizzled out, never got going, had all been in the mind to begin with: that didn't make it any the less real. And it was the only story.”
― Julian Barnes, The Only Story

“Once bitten, twice shy; twice bitten, forever shy.”
― Julian Barnes, The Only Story

“And first love always happens in the overwhelming first person. How can it not? Also, in the overwhelming present tense. It takes us time to realise that there are other persons, and other tenses.”
― Julian Barnes, The Only Story

“We're leaving," I told her one July afternoon.

"We? You and I? Where are we going, young Master Paul? Do you have your belongings tied up in a red-spotted handkerchief on a stick?”
― Julian Barnes, The Only Story

“He sometimes asked himself a question about life. Which are truer, the happy memories, or the unhappy ones? He decided, eventually, that the question was unanswerable.”
― Julian Barnes, The Only Story

“The long answer was too time-consuming to give. The short answer was too painful. It went like this. It was a question of what heartbreak is, and how exactly the heart breaks, and what is left of it afterwards.”
― Julian Barnes, The Only Story

“And who does not want their love authenticated?”
― Julian Barnes, The Only Story

“He knew what they said of him locally: Oh, he likes to keep himself to himself. The phrase was descriptive, not judgemental. It was a principle of life the English still respected. And it wasn't just about privacy, about an Englishman's home—even a pebbledash semi—being his castle. It was about something more: about the self, and where you kept it, and who, if anyone, was allowed to fully see it.”
― Julian Barnes, The Only Story

“He never recorded the writer or the source: he didn't want to be bullied by reputation; truth should stand by itself, clear and unsupported.”
― Julian Barnes, The Only Story

“The sadness of life. That was another conundrum he would occasionally ponder.”
― Julian Barnes, The Only Story

“And perhaps I I didn't even understand the young when I was young. That could be true too.”
― Julian Barnes, The Only Story

“Nowadays, at the other end of life, I have a rule of thumb about whether or not two people are having an affair: if you think they might be, then they definitely are.”
― Julian Barnes, The Only Story

“So. I see where you're going—bus number 27 to a crossroads near Delphi. Look, I did not want, at any point, on any level, to kill my own father and sleep with my own mother. It's true that I wanted to sleep with Susan—and did so many times—and for a number of years thought of killing Gordon Macleod, but that is another part of the story. Not to put too fine a point on it, I think the Oedipus myth is precisely what it started off as: melodrama rather than psychology. In all my years of life I've never met anyone to whom it might apply.

You think I'm being naive? You wish to point out that human motivation is deviously buried, and hides its mysterious workings from those who blindly submit to it? Perhaps so. But even—especially—Oedipus didn't want to kill his father and sleep with his mother, did he? Oh yes he did! Oh no he didn't! Yes, let's just leave it as a pantomime exchange.”
― Julian Barnes, The Only Story

“Later—well, what came later, came later.”
― Julian Barnes, The Only Story

“Sit yourself down," Joan instructed as we reached the the fag-fogged, gin-scented den that was nominally her sitting room.”
― Julian Barnes, The Only Story

“So (and this would have happened earlier, but I am only remembering it now): I am visiting her one afternoon.”
― Julian Barnes, The Only Story

“Whereas it seemed to me, back then, in the absolutism of my condition, that love had nothing to do with practicality; indeed, was its polar opposite. And the fact that it showed contempt for such banal considerations was part of its glory. Love was by its very nature disruptive, cataclysmic; and if it was not, then it was not love.”
― Julian Barnes, The Only Story

“It is only a metaphor—or the worst of dreams; yet there are metaphors which sit more powerfully in the brain than remembered events.”
― Julian Barnes, The Only Story

“But that was the nature of relationships: there always seemed to be an imbalance of one sort or another.”
― Julian Barnes, The Only Story

“She has only a ghostplay on some frayed screen of memory, which she takes to be the present.”
― Julian Barnes, The Only Story

“And even when he guessed that the love stories of the misled and the forsaken had become a little less authentic with each retelling . . . even if this was the case, he was still moved. Indeed, he was more moved by the lives of the bereft and the unchosen than he was by stories of success in love.”
― Julian Barnes, The Only Story

“Love means never having to say you're sorry (on the contrary, it frequently means doing just precisely that). Then there were all those love lines from all those love songs, with the swooning delusions of lyricist, singer, band.”
― Julian Barnes, The Only Story

“From love's absolutism to love's absolution? No: I don't believe in the cosy narratives of life some find necessary, just as I choke on comforting words like redemption and closure. Death is the only closure I believe in; and the wound will stay open until that final shutting of the doors. As for redemption, it's far too neat, a movie-maker's bromide; and beyond that, it feels like something grand, which human beings are too imperfect to deserve, much less bestow upon themselves.”
― Julian Barnes, The Only Story

“The only moral of the story is to learn the moral of your story -”
― Isbelle Razors