"The Sense of an Ending" - Julian Barnes

Here is a collection of my favourite lines from the book, which really made me reflect on time (aptly for our unit 3 part 1 project). Throughout the book I questioned my memory, how time distorts our memories. How all events happen in the same space and time but every person will have a different account, point of view and experience. 

• We live in time- it holds and moulds us.”
• “It takes the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time's malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing- until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return.”
• “Most people don't experience the 'Sixties' until the 'Seventies'.”
• “You can infer past actions from current mental states.”
• “History that's happened in my own lifetime.”
• “For some people the time differentials established in youth never really disappear: the elder remains the elder, even when both are dribbling greybeards. For some people, a gap of, say, five months means that one person will perversely always think of himself-herself as wiser and more knowledgeable than the other, whatever the evidence to the contrary.”
• “We live with such easy assumptions, don't we? For instance, that memory equals events plus time.”
• “Memory is what we thought we'd forgotten. And it ought to be obvious to us time doesn't act as a fixative, rather a solvent.”
• “The less time remains in your life the less you want to waste it...how you use your saved up hours.”
• “They say time finds you out.”
• “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.”
• “Nostalgia means the powerful recollection of strong emotions- and a regret that such feeling are no longer present in our lives.”
• “I'm sure psychologists somewhere have made a graph of intelligence measured against age.”
• “How time first grounds us and then confounds us...Time...give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.”
• “Does character develop over time? In novels, of course it does: otherwise there wouldn't be much of a story. But in life? I sometimes wonder. Our attitudes and opinions change, we develop new habits, and eccentricities; but that's something different, more like decoration. Perhaps character resembles intelligence, except that character peaks a little later: between twenty and thirty, day. And after that, we're just stuck with what we've got. We're our own. If so that would explain a lot of lives...our tragedy.”
• “What is history?...the lies of the victors? 'As long as you remember that it is also the self-delusions of the defeated.' Do we remember that enough when it comes to our private lives?”
• “The time-deniers say: forty's nothing, at fifty you're in your prime, Sixty's the new forty, and so on. I know this much: that there is objective time, but also subjective time, the kind you wear on the inside of your wrist, next to where the pulse lies. And his personal time, which is true time, is measured in your relationship to memory. So when this strange thing happened- when these new memories suddenly came upon me- it was as if, for that moment, time had been placed in reverse. As if, for that moment, the river ran upstream.”
• “As I tend to repeat, I have some instinct for survival, for self-preservation.”
• “Who had neither won nor lost, but just let life happen to him.”