The Sense of an Ending

by Julian Barnes

‘History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.’

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.

Time … give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.

How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but—mainly—to ourselves.