Bertbarber

“What an awful thing life is, isn’t it? It’s like soup with lots of hairs floating on the surface. You have to eat it nevertheless.”
― Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot

“Why does anyone live here? Why was he set down here; why is this particular ordinary town for him the center and index of a universe that contains great prairies, mountains, deserts, forests, cities, seas? This childish mystery—the mystery of “any place,” prelude to the ultimate, “Why am I me?”—re-ignites panic in his heart.”
― John Updike, Rabbit, Run

“And you do come out of it, that’s true. After a year, after five. But you don’t come out of it like a train coming out of a tunnel, bursting through the Downs into sunshine and that swift, rattling descent to the Channel; you come out of it as a gull comes out of an oil-slick. You are tarred and feathered for life.”
― Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot

“At one point we would have called these affairs consensual, for they were, and were conducted with my vague understanding that they were happening. Now, however, young women have apparently lost all agency in romantic entanglements. Now my husband was abusing his power, never mind that power is the reason they desired him in the first place. Whatever the current state of my marriage may be, I still can't think about it all without my blood boiling. My anger is not so much directed toward the accusations as it is toward the lack of self-regard these women have - the lack of their own confidence. I wish they could see themselves not as little leaves swirled around by the wind of a world that does not belong to them, but as powerful, sexual women interested in engaging in a little bit of danger, a little bit of taboo, a little bit of fun. With the highly objectionable move toward a populist insistence of morality in art, I find this post hoc prudery offensive, as a fellow female.”
― Julia May Jonas, Vladimir