The Noise of Time Quotes

“Art belongs to everybody and nobody. Art belongs to all time and no time. Art belongs to those who create it and those who savour it. Art no more belongs to the People and the Party than it once belonged to the aristocracy and the patron. Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time. Art does not exist for art’s sake: it exists for people’s sake.”
― Julian Barnes, The Noise of Time

“Sarcasm is irony which has lost its soul”
― Julian Barnes, The Noise of Time

“Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time.”
― Julian Barnes, The Noise of Time

“Perhaps this was one of the tragedies life plots for us: it is our destiny to become in old age what in youth we would have most despised.”
― Julian Barnes, The Noise of Time

“It had been a slow and painful business, discovering that the theory of love did not match the reality of life. It was like expecting to be able to write a symphony because you had once read a handbook of composition.”
― Julian Barnes, The Noise of Time

“In an ideal world, a young man should not be an ironical person. At that age, irony prevents growth, stunts the imagination. It is best to start life in a cheerful and open state of mind, believing in others, being optimistic, being frank with everyone about everything. And then, as one comes to understand things and people better, to develop a sense of irony. The natural progression of human life is from optimism to pessimism; and a sense of irony helps temper pessimism, helps produce balance, harmony. But”
― Julian Barnes, The Noise of Time

“Being a hero was much easier than being a coward. To be a hero, you only had to be brave for a moment - when you took out the gun, threw the bomb, pressed the detonator, did away with the tyrant, and away with yourself as well. But to be a coward was to embark on a career that lasted a lifetime. You couldn't ever relax. You had to anticipate the next occasion when you would have to make excuses for yourself, dither, cringe, reacquaint yourself with the taste of rubber boots and the state of your own fallen, abject character. Being a coward required pertinacity, persistence, a refusal to change - which made it, in a way, a kind of courage.”
― Julian Barnes, The Noise of Time

“Rather, what happened to human illusions was that they crumbled, they withered away. It was a long and wearisome process, like a toothache reaching far into the soul. But you can pull out a tooth and it will be gone. Illusions, however, even when dead, continue to rot and stink within us. We cannot escape their taste and smell. We carry them around with us all the time.”
― Julian Barnes, The Noise of Time

“How easy it was to be a Communist when you weren’t living under Communism!”
― Julian Barnes, The Noise of Time

“Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time. Art does not exist for art's sake: it exists for people's sake.”
― Julian Barnes, The Noise of Time

“Life always refused simplicity.”
― Julian Barnes, The Noise of Time

“Sarcasm was dangerous to its user, identifiable as the language of the wrecker and the saboteur. But irony – perhaps, sometimes, so he hoped – might enable you to preserve what you valued, even as the noise of time became loud enough to knock out window-panes.”
― Julian Barnes, The Noise of Time

“History was repeating itself: the first time as farce, the second time as tragedy.”
― Julian Barnes, The Noise of Time

“The strong cannot help confronting; the less strong cannot help evading.”
― Julian Barnes, The Noise of Time

“Music escapes from words: that is its purpose, and its majesty.”
― Julian Barnes, The Noise of Time

“The engineers of human souls'. There were two main problems. The first was that many people did not want their souls to be egineered, thank you very much. They were content with their souls being left as they were when they had come into this world; and when you tried to lead them, they resisted. Come to this free open-air concert, comrade. Oh, we really think you should attend. Yes, of course, it is voluntary, but it might be a mistake if you didn't show your face...
And the second problem with engineering human souls was more basic. It was this: who engineers the engineers?”
― Julian Barnes, The Noise of Time

“Music — good music, great music — had a hard, irreducible purity to it. It might be bitter and despairing and pessimistic, but it could never be cynical. If music is tragic, those with asses’ ears accuse it of being cynical. But when a composer is bitter, or in despair, or pessimistic, that still means he believes in something.”
― Julian Barnes, The Noise of Time

“If you turned your back on irony, it curdled into sarcasm. And what good was it then? Sarcasm was irony which had lost its soul.”
― Julian Barnes, The Noise of Time

“In Jewish folk music, despair is disguised as the dance. And so, truth’s disguise was irony.”
― Julian Barnes, The Noise of Time

“...and who's to say what would have been for the best? You only found out afterwards, when it was too late.”
― Julian Barnes, The Noise of Time

“Tragedies in hindsight look like farces.”
― Julian Barnes, The Noise of Time

“Those in favour rarely stayed in favour; it was just a question of when they fell.”
― Julian Barnes, The Noise of Time

“It had all begun, very precisely, he told his mind, on the morning of the 28th of January 1936, at Arkhangelsk railway station. No, his mind responded, nothing begins just like that, on a certain date at a certain place. It all began in many places, and at many times, some even before you were born, in foreign countries, and in the minds of others. —”
― Julian Barnes, The Noise of Time

“And in these times, people were always in danger of becoming less than fully themselves. If you terrorised them enough, they became something else, something diminished and reduced: mere techniques for survival. And so, it was not just an anxiety, but often a brute fear that he experienced: the fear that love's last days had come.”
― Julian Barnes, The Noise of Time

“Theories were clean and convincing and comprehensible. Life was messy and full of nonsense.”
― Julian Barnes, The Noise of Time

“What could be put up against the noise of time? Only that music which is inside ourselves--the music of our being--which is transformed by some into real music. Which, over the decades, if it is strong and true and pure enough to drown out the noise of time, is transformed into the whisper of history.”
― Julian Barnes, The Noise of Time

“Уметност припада сваком и ником. Уметност припада сваком времену и не припада ниједном. Уметност припада онима који је стварају и онима који је доживљавају. Уметност је шапат историје, који надјачава шум времена. Уметност не постоји ради уметности: она постоји за добро људи.”
― Julian Barnes, The Noise of Time

“It seemed such a brief while ago that they were all laughing at Professor Nikolayev's definition of a musicologist. Imagine we are eating scrambled eggs, the Professor used to say. My cook, Pasha, has prepared them, and you and I are eating them. Along comes a man who has not prepared them and is not eating them, but he talks about them as if he knows everything about them - that is a musicologist.”
― Julian Barnes, The Noise of Time

“And yet, for all this, for all that he was unparalleled in depicting tyrants knee-deep in blood, Shakespeare was a little naive. Because his monsters had doubts, bad dreams, pangs of conscience, guilt. They saw the spirits of those they had killed rising in front of them. But in real life, under real terror, what guilty conscience? What bad dreams? That was all sentimentality, false optimism, a hope that the world would be as we wanted it to be, rather than as it was. Those who chopped the wood and made the chips fly, those who smoked Belomory behind their desks at the Big House, those who signed the orders and made the telephone calls, closing a dossier and with it a life: how few of them had bad dreams, or ever saw the spirits of the dead rising to reproach them." (p 94)”
― Julian Barnes, The Noise of Time

“In an ideal world, a young man should not be an ironical person. At that age, irony prevents growth, stunts the imagination. It is best to start life in a cheerful and open state of mind, believing in others, being optimistic, being frank with everyone about everything. And then, as one comes to understand things and people better, to develop a sense of irony. The natural progression of human life is from optimism to pessimism; and a sense of irony helps temper pessimism, helps produce balance, harmony. But this was not an ideal world, and so irony grew in sudden and strange ways. Overnight, like a mushroom; disastrously, like a cancer. Sarcasm was dangerous to its user, identifiable as the language of the wrecker and the saboteur. But irony – perhaps, sometimes, so he hoped – might enable you to preserve what you valued, even as the noise of time became loud enough to knock out window-panes. What”
― Julian Barnes, The Noise of Time