Anita Brookner

10 Quotes

Nobody grows up. Everyone carries around all the selves that they have ever been, intact, waiting to be reactivated in moments of pain, of fear, of danger. Everything is retrievable, every shock, every hurt.

Writing novels preserves you in a state of innocence - a lot passes you by - simply because your attention is otherwise diverted.

Real love is a pilgrimage. It happens when there is no strategy, but it is very rare because most people are strategists.

The lessons taught in great books are misleading. The commerce in life is rarely so simple and never so just.

To remain pure a novel has to cast a moral puzzle. Anything else is mere negotiation.

In real life, 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.

You never know what you will learn till you start writing. Then you discover truths you never knew existed.

Writing has freed me from the despair of living.

It was then that I saw the business of writing for what it truly was and is to me. It is your penance for not being lucky. It is an attempt to reach others and to make them love you. It is your instinctive protest, when you find you have no voice at the world’s tribunals, and that no one will speak for you. 

Existentialism is about being a saint without God; being your own hero, without all the sanction and support of religion or society.

Brookner is an English novelist and art historian. She won the Booker Prize for Hotel du Lac.

"The public does not like bad literature. The public likes a certain kind of literature and likes that kind of literature even when it is bad better than another kind of literature even when it is good. Nor is this unreasonable; for the line between different types of literature is as real as the line between tears and laughter; and to tell people who can only get bad comedy that you have some first-class tragedy is as irrational as to offer a man who is shivering over weak warm coffee a really superior sort of ice."

G.K. Chesterton. Quote of the Day « The Gentlemen’s Society for the Advancement of Mental Cultivation, Erudition, and Letters.

"The world’s most difficult word to translate has been identified as “ilunga” from the Tshiluba language spoken in south-eastern DR Congo.

It came top of a list drawn up in consultation with 1,000 linguists.

Ilunga means “a person who is ready to forgive any abuse for the first time, to tolerate it a second time, but never a third time”.

It seems straightforward enough, but the 1,000 language experts identified it as the hardest word to translate. In second place was shlimazl which is Yiddish for “a chronically unlucky person”.

Third was Naa, used in the Kansai area of Japan to emphasise statements or agree with someone.

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BBC NEWS | Africa | Congo word ‘most untranslatable’

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