Anita Brookner

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born

July 16, 1928 in Herne Hill, England, The United Kingdom

gender

female

genre

Literature & Fiction

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Books by Anita Brookner

Average rating: 3.50 · 6,325 ratings · 765 reviews · 46 distinct works

	Hotel du Lac 3.44 avg rating — 2,635 ratings — published 1984 — 23 editions	My rating:
	Look At Me 3.81 avg rating — 243 ratings — published 1983 — 10 editions	My rating:
	The Rules of Engagement 3.24 avg rating — 241 ratings — 12 editions	My rating:
	Leaving Home 3.33 avg rating — 219 ratings — published 1987 — 13 editions	My rating:
	Strangers 3.36 avg rating — 222 ratings — published 2009 — 14 editions	My rating:
	Altered States 3.39 avg rating — 172 ratings — published 1996 — 12 editions	My rating:
	Incidents in the Rue Laugier 3.64 avg rating — 150 ratings — 10 editions	My rating:
	The Debut 3.60 avg rating — 129 ratings — 3 editions	My rating:
	A Misalliance 3.77 avg rating — 133 ratings — published 1987 — 11 editions	My rating:
	Fraud 3.69 avg rating — 134 ratings — published 1992 — 9 editions	My rating:

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Quotes by Anita Brookner

“Good women always think it is their fault when someone else is being offensive. Bad women never take the blame for anything.”
― Anita Brookner, Hotel du Lac

tags: women

33 people liked it

“Dr Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature”
― Anita Brookner, A Start In Life

tags: first-line , literature , ruined

8 people liked it

“My idea of absolute happiness is to sit in a hot garden all, 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.”
― Anita Brookner, Hotel du Lac

7 people liked it

See all Anita Brookner's quotes »

Polls

Sometimes the first line of a book just grabs you by the nostrils and drags your fool head into its pages, preventing escape in any way, shape or form. Which of these opening lines has its phalanges most firmly planted in your nasal cavities?

"I write this sitting in the kitchen sink."

I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith

266 votes, 5.5%

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife."

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

251 votes, 5.2%

"Mr and Mrs Dursley, of number four Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much."

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone by J.K. Rowling

237 votes, 4.9%

"There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it."

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C.S. Lewis

217 votes, 4.5%

"It was a pleasure to burn."

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

201 votes, 4.2%

"If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth."

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

196 votes, 4.0%

"He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad."

Scaramouche by Raphael Sabatini

195 votes, 4.0%

"It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York."

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

157 votes, 3.2%

"In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit."

The Hobbit: Or There and Back Again by J.R.R. Tolkien

146 votes, 3.0%

"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

143 votes, 3.0%

"All children, except one, grow up."

Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie

141 votes, 2.9%

"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen."

1984 by George Orwell

134 votes, 2.8%

"Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small, unregarded yellow sun."

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

132 votes, 2.7%

"All this happened, more or less."

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

130 votes, 2.7%

"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

129 votes, 2.7%

"As Gregor Samsa awoke from a night of uneasy dreaming, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect."

The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

123 votes, 2.5%

Bah! Foolish poll-maker-person! The nostril seizing power of these paltry lines is minimal, at best! Look to the comments section where I shall carefully type out my choice, which you have so imprudently omitted!

123 votes, 2.5%

"He— for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it— was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters."

Orlando by Virginia Woolf

113 votes, 2.3%

"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins."

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

113 votes, 2.3%

"It was the day my grandmother exploded."

The Crow Road by Iain Banks

113 votes, 2.3%

"There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife."

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

112 votes, 2.3%

"I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice - not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany."

A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving

95 votes, 2.0%

“'To be born again,' sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, 'first you have to die.'”

The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie

95 votes, 2.0%

"Of all the things that drive men to sea, the most common disaster, I've come to learn, is women."

Middle Passage by Charles Johnson

95 votes, 2.0%

"Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person."

Back When We Were Grownups by Anne Tyler

89 votes, 1.8%

"Mother died today."

The Stranger by Albert Camus

87 votes, 1.8%

"I am a sick man . . . I am a spiteful man."

Notes From Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky

82 votes, 1.7%

"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."

Neuromancer by William Gibson

80 votes, 1.7%

"Call me Ishmael."

Moby Dick by Herman Melville

68 votes, 1.4%

"No one would have believed, in the last years of the nineteenth century, that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were being scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water."

The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells

65 votes, 1.3%

"There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie and Dim and we sat in the Korova milkbar trying to make up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening."

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

60 votes, 1.2%

“'When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets,' Papa would say, 'she made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing.'”

Geek Love by Katherine Dunn

59 votes, 1.2%

"Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show."

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

55 votes, 1.1%

"The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new."

Murphy by Samuel Beckett

53 votes, 1.1%

"The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up."

The Napoleon of Notting Hill by G.K. Chesterton

51 votes, 1.1%

"For a long time, I went to bed early."

Swann's Way by Marcel Proust

46 votes, 1.0%

"Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden."

The Broom of the System by David Foster Wallace

45 votes, 0.9%

"When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon."

The Last Good Kiss by James Crumley

43 votes, 0.9%

"Ages ago, Alex, Allen and Alva arrived at Antibes, and Alva allowing all, allowing anyone, against Alex's admonition, against Allen's angry assertion: another African amusement . . . anyhow, as all argued, an awesome African army assembled and arduously advanced against an African anthill, assiduously annihilating ant after ant, and afterward, Alex astonishingly accuses Albert as also accepting Africa's antipodal ant annexation."

Alphabetical Africa by Walter Abish

42 votes, 0.9%

"When a day that you happen to know is Wednesday starts off by sounding like Sunday, there is something seriously wrong somewhere."

The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham

36 votes, 0.7%

"I have never begun a novel with more misgiving."

The Razor's Edge by W. Somerset Maugham

28 votes, 0.6%

"Somewhere in la Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing."

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

26 votes, 0.5%

"My lady and I are being shut up in a tower for seven years"

Book of a Thousand Days by Shannon Hale

26 votes, 0.5%

"It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the house-tops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness."

Paul Clifford by Edward George Bulwer-Lytton

24 votes, 0.5%

"The moment one learns English, complications set in."

Chromos by Felipe Alfau

21 votes, 0.4%

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

The Debut by Anita Brookner

20 votes, 0.4%

"'Barabbas came to us by sea', the child Clara wrote in her delicate calligraphy."

The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende

19 votes, 0.4%

"Of Herbert West, who was my friend in college and in after life, I can speak only with extreme terror."

Herbert West: Reanimator and Other Stories by H.P. Lovecraft

17 votes, 0.4%

"Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu."

Waiting by Ha Jin

16 votes, 0.3%

"When I was three and Bailey was four, we had arrived in the musty little town, wearing tags on our wrists which instructed - 'To Whom It May Concern' - that we were Marguerite and Bailey Johnson Jr., from Long Beach, California, en route to Stamps, Arkansas, c/o Mrs. Annie Henderson."

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

13 votes, 0.3%

"What if this young woman, who writes such bad poems, in competition with her husband, whose poems are equally bad, should stretch her remarkably long and well-made legs out before you, so that her skirt slips up to the tops of her stockings?"

Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things by Gilbert Sorrentino

12 votes, 0.2%

4840 total votes

159 comments

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Topics Mentioning This Author

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The Next Best Boo...: OFFICIAL SUMMER CHALLENGE 2009	6757	10108	Aug 31, 2009 10:23pm
Glens Falls (NY) ...: Do U SKIM much when you read?	14	25	Oct 02, 2009 09:50am
Glens Falls (NY) ...: What are U reading these days? (Part Five) (begun 3/12/09)	1049	448	Dec 31, 2009 10:39pm
THE JAMES MASON C...: AUTHOR FORUM - ANITA BROOKNER	3	19	Mar 03, 2010 02:30pm
The Seasonal Read...: 25.4 - Nicole OH's Task - Happy Birthday to Me!	104	215	Jul 31, 2010 10:10am
UK Book Club: Zoe's List	20	88	Jan 06, 2011 05:33am
The Book Addicts!: Heidi's TBR challenge 2011	8	46	Jun 22, 2011 08:39am
You'll love this ...: And Ladies of the Club	47	56	Jul 06, 2011 07:00am
Read a book from ...: Switzerland	5	57	Aug 06, 2011 02:35pm

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Anita Brookner

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Topics Mentioning This Author

combine editions
Books by Anita Brookner