The Sense of an Ending - Julian Barnes (2011)

Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only 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.

(p.3)

It's just a phase, they would insist. You'll grow out of it; life will teach you reality and realism.

(p.11)

And writing to one another seemed to have recalibrated the dynamics of our relationship. The original three wrote less often and less enthusiastically to one another than we did to Adrian.

(p.19)

... most people didn't experience 'the Sixties' until the Seventies.

(p.40)

'They grow up so quickly, don't they?' when all you really mean is: time goes faster for me nowadays.

(p.55)

But then you begin to understand that the reward of merit is not life's business.

(p.59)

Discovering, for example, that as witnesses to your life diminish, there is less corroboration, and therefore less certainty, as to what you are or have been. 

(p.59)

The less time there remains in your life, the less you want to waste it.

(p.68)

... something of Margaret had rubbed off on me over the years.

(p.75)

'the littleness of life that art exaggerates'

(p.93)

... the chief characteristic of remorse is that nothing can be done about it: that the time has passed for apology or amends.

(p.107)

once bitten, twice bitten...

(p.119)

The key point of the novel is that our memories are incomplete and imperfect, because of forgetting and the current state of mind.

Other people, documents (letters, diaries) act as corroborators of memories.

- RKP