Flaubert's Parrot

by Julian Barnes

And if you don’t like these ironies, I have others.

What was the point of scientific advance without moral advance? The railway would merely permit more people to move about, meet and be stupid together.

A pier is a disappointed bridge; yet stare at it for long enough and you can dream it to the other side of the Channel.

‘Language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.’

if all your responses to a book have already been duplicated and expanded upon by a professional critic, then what point is there to your reading? Only that it’s yours. Similarly, why live your life? Because it’s yours. But what if such an answer gradually becomes less and less convincing?

Books make sense of life. The only problem is that the lives they make sense of are other people’s lives, never your own.

Do not participate: happiness lies in the imagination, not the act. Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory.