Barbara

“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

“Time goes, you say? Ah, no! Alas, Time stays, we go.”
― Henry Austin Dobson

“Listen, and you will realize that we are made not from cells or from atoms. We are made from stories.”
― Mia Couto

“No, give me the past. It doesn’t change; it’s all there in black and white, and you can get to know about it comfortably and decorously and, above all, privately - by reading. … As reading becomes more and more habitual and widespread, an ever-increasing number of people will discover that books will give them all the pleasures of social life and none of its intolerable tedium.”
― Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow