Anita Brookner
Birthdate: July 16, 1928
Birthplace: Herne Hill, London, England, United Kingdom
Date of Death: March 10, 2016
Occupation: Author and Critic
Profile: Best known for
Hotel du Lac.
Website: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anita_Brookner
Number of Quotes: 79
A complete woman is probably not a very admirable creature. She is manipulative,
uses other people to get her own way, and works within whatever system she is in.
A Start in Life
A man can go from being a lover to being a stranger in three moves flat but a woman under the guise of friendship will
engage in acts of duplicity which come to light very much later. There are different species of self-justification.
Undue Influence
A man of such obvious and exemplary charm must be a liar.
Hotel du Lac
A woman owes it to herself to have pretty things.
A Start in Life
Accountability in friendship is the equivalent of love without strategy.
Latecomers
All good fortune is a gift of the gods, and you don't win the favor of the ancient gods by being good, but by being bold.
Hotel du Lac
Always let them think of you as singing and dancing.
Brief Lives
And without understanding, could each properly love the other?
Altered States
And yet she had never felt so bereft, as if her presence in other lives were entirely illusory, as if she herself were a kind of facsimile, pleasant but
inauthentic. Before she got too old she must wrest some part of her life for herself, or she would fade, vanish, before anyone noticed her disappearance.
A Closed Eye
Art, he felt, let him down. For great paintings he felt only respect. Museum spaces beckoned him in, even welcomed him, but then left him on his own.
Strangers
As if the next thing must quickly come along to occupy her, or the abyss might open. What abyss? The abyss that waits for all of
us, when all our actions seem futile, when the ability to fill the day seems stalled, and the waiting takes on an edge of dread.
Latecomers
Death is only a small interruption.
Making Things Better
Dr. Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature.
The Debut
Existentialism is about being a saint without God,
being your own hero, without all the sanction and support of religion or society.
Latecomers
Fiction, the time-honoured resource of the ill-at-ease, would have to come to her aid.
Hotel du Lac
Fiction is the great repository of the moral sense. The wicked get punished.
The Next Big Thing
For once a thing is known, it can never be unknown. It can only be forgotten.
Look at Me
Fortunately, common sense asserted itself and I vowed that I should never wait for anyone again.
Brief Lives
Good women always think it is their fault when someone else is being offensive. Bad women never take the blame for anything.
Hotel du Lac
Great writers are the saints for the godless.
Novelists in Interview
I am 46, and have been for some time past.
A Start in 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.
Hotel du Lac
I could not, somehow, make contact with any familiar emotion. As I lingered in front of a lighted window,
apparently beguiled by a pair of burgundy leather shoes, I could only identify a feeling of exclusion.
Look at Me
I need noise and interruptions and irritation. Irritation and discomfort are a great starter. The loneliness of doing it any other way would kill me.
Novelists in Interview
I never learnt Hebrew because my health was fragile, and it was thought that learning Hebrew would be an added
burden. I regret it, because I would like to be able to join in fully. Not that I am a believer, but I would like to be.
The Paris Review
I saw the business of writing for what it truly was and is to me. It is your penance for not being lucky.
Look at Me
I suppose what one wants really is ideal company and books are ideal company.
Novelists in Interview
I think you always feel braver in another language.
Strangers
I was a teacher most of my life, which I loved. I had a very happy working life, and when I retired, I thought I must do something, and I've always
read a lot of fiction — you learn so much from fiction. My sentimental education came mostly from fiction, I should say, so I thought I'd try.
The Observer (January, 2001)
I was brought up among the sort of self-important women who had a husband as one has an alibi.
A Start in Life
I was brought up to look after my parents. My family were Polish Jews, and we lived with my
grandmother, with uncles and aunts and cousins all around, and I thought everybody lived like that.
The Paris Review
I'm a middle-class, middle-brow novelist. And that's it. It amuses me.
The Observer (2001)
I'm not very popular, because they're bleak and they're mournful and all the rest of it and I get
censorious reviews. But I'm only writing fiction. I'm not making munitions, so I think it's acceptable.
I've never got on very well with Jane Austen.
The Observer (2001)
If I were happy, married with six children, I wouldn't be writing. And I doubt if I should want to.
The Paris Review
If, as we have it on the highest authority, there is more joy in Heaven over one sinner that repenteth, why not sin,
provisionally? Why not break the rules, like that Prodigal Son (so much more amusing than his tedious brother)?
Look at Me
In real life, of course, it is the hare who wins. Every time. Look around you. And in any case it is my contention
that Aesop was writing for the tortoise market ...
Hares have no time to read. They are too busy winning the game.
Hotel du Lac
In the books she favoured, but wistfully, women were unmasked, laid bare by a man who
finally understood them. She knew that this was rubbish, but found the illusion so beguiling.
Falling Slowly
In the street the rain was little more than a fine mist, which softened the outlines of the
houses and even lent a touch of poetry to a neighbourhood unlikely to evoke tender emotions.
Making Things Better
It is best to marry for purely selfish reasons.
A Start in Life
It is my contention that Aesop was writing for the tortoise market. Hares have no time to read.
Hotel du Lac
It was, I saw, a flat to get out of rather than one to stay in. It was a machine for eating and
sleeping in, a suitable dwelling place for a working woman, whose main interest is in her work.
A Friend From England
It will be a pity if women in the more conventional mould are to be phased out, for there will never be anyone to go home to.
A Friend From England
Life is a pilgrimage and if you don't play by the rules, you don't find the Road to Damascus, you find the Crown of Thorns.
Hotel du Lac
Like many rich men, he thought in anecdotes; like many simple women, she thought in terms of biography.
Altered States
Men can bury their past. An unmarried woman is her past. Whereas a wife has a social position. A spinster has none.
Altered States
My idea of absolute happiness is to sit in a hot garden all day, reading, or writing, utterly
safe in the knowledge that the person I love will come home to me in the evening. Every evening.
Hotel du Lac
No blame should attach to telling the truth. But it does, it does.
Brief Lives
No man is free of his own history.
Latecomers
Not everyone is born to fulfill an heroic role. The only realistic ambition is to live in
the present. And sometimes, quite often in fact, this is more than enough to keep one busy.
Making Things Better
Old men should have more care to end life well than to live long.
One loses the capacity to grieve as a child grieves, or to rage as a child rages. One grows up, one becomes
civilized, one learns one's manners, and consequently can no longer manage these two functions—sorrow and anger—adequately.
Latecomers
Only the fantasy of choice remained.
Strangers
People say that I am always serious and depressing, but it seems to me that the English are never
serious — they are flippant, complacent, ineffable, but never serious, which is sometimes maddening.
Novelists in Interview
Problems of human behavior still continue to baffle us, but at least in the Library we have them properly filed.
The Debut
Real love is a pilgrimage. It happens when there is no strategy, but it is very rare because most people are strategists.
Novelists in Interview
Romanticism is not just a mode; it literally eats into every life. Women will never get rid of just waiting for the right man.
Novelists in Interview
Satire is dependent on strong beliefs, and on strong beliefs wounded.
A Start in Life
She leaned back in her chair and raised her face to the sun. Seduced, also, by the possibility that she might please herself, simply by wishing it so.
Hotel du Lac
She was a handsome woman of forty-five and would remain so for many years.
A Closed Eye
That sun, that light had faded, and she had faded with them. Now she was as grey as the season itself.
Hotel du Lac
The essence of romantic love is that wonderful beginning, after which sadness and impossibility may become the rule.
Hotel du Lac
The future is not always a whole new ball game. There tends to be unfinished business.
One trails all sorts of things around with one, things that simply won't be got rid of.
Lewis Percy
The house — a substantial but essentially modest suburban villa — was furnished with voluptuous grandeur in approximations
of various styles, predominantly those of several Louis, with late nineteenth — and early twentieth-century additions.
A Friend From England
The lessons taught in great books are misleading. The commerce in life is rarely so simple and never so just.
The Debut
The trouble with good manners is that people are persuaded that you are all right, require no protection, are perfectly capable of looking after yourself.
Look at Me
There are moments when you feel free, moments when you have energy, moments when you have
hope, but you can't rely on any of these things to see you through. Circumstances do that.
Novelists in Interview
There is absolutely no need for me ever again to pretend everything is all right. It
is not, nor was it ever. It was unendurable, and I trained myself to endure it.
Look at Me
Time misspent in youth is sometimes all the freedom one ever has.
A Start in Life
We were both dutiful, of course. My mother because she was a dutiful woman: I myself felt
less humble but knew that life was only simple when one concurred with the wishes of others.
Undue Influence
What is interesting about self-analysis is that it leads nowhere — it is an art form in itself.
Novelists in Interview
When you make a break for freedom you don't necessarily find company on the way.
Hotel du Lac
Women have come a long way, of course: we can all be left alone at night now. But sometimes it seems a high price to
pay. We can also open the door cheerfully to strangers at any hour, deal with obscene telephone calls and mend fuses.
A Friend From England
Writing has freed me from the despair of living.
Novelists in Interview
Writing novels preserves you in a state of innocence—a lot passes you by — simply because your attention is otherwise diverted.
Novelists in Interview
You are wrong if you think you cannot live without love. I cannot live without it. I do not mean that I go
into a decline, develop odd symptoms, become a caricature. I mean that I cannot live well without it.
Hotel du Lac
You can never betray the people who are dead, so you go on being a public Jew; the dead can't answer slurs, but I'm here. I would love to
think that Jesus wants me for a sunbeam, but he doesn't.
Novelists in Interview
You have no idea how promising the world begins to look once you have decided to have it all
for yourself. And how much healthier your decisions are once they become entirely selfish.
Hotel du Lac
You never know what you will learn till you start writing. Then you discover truths you never knew existed.
Novelists in Interview
Last on Earth
