The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

The Sense of an ending is a novel written in 2011 by Julian Barnes.
Quotes:
“We live in time- it holds us and moulds us – but I’ve never felt I understood it very well… 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.”
“When we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves, when we are old, we invent different pasts for others.”
“Odd how the image of someone’s posture always remains with you.”
“Life isn’t just addition and subtraction. There’s also the accumulation, the multiplication, of loss, of failure.”
““History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.”
“And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability.”
“When you're young - when I was young - you want your emotions to be like the ones you read about in books. You want them to overturn your life, create and define a new reality. Later, I think, you want them to do something milder, something more practical: you want them to support your life as it is and has become. You want them to tell you that things are OK. And is there anything wrong with that?”
“I certainly believe we all suffer damage, one way or another. How could we not,except in a world of perfect parents, siblings, neighbors, companions? And then there is the question on which so much depends, of how we react to the damage: whether we admit it or repress it,and how this affects our dealings with others.Some admit the damage, and try to mitigate it;some spend their lives trying to help others who are damaged; and there are those whose main concern is to avoid further damage to themselves, at whatever cost. And those are the ones who are ruthless, and the ones to be careful of.”
“We live with such easy assumptions, don't we? For instance, that memory equals events plus time. But it's all much odder than this. Who was it said that memory is what we thougt we'd forgotten? And it ought to be obvious to us that time doesn't act as a fixative, rather as a solvent. But it's not convenient--- it's not useful--- to believe this; it doesn't help us get on with our lives; so we ignore it.”
“That's one of the central problems of history, isn't it, sir? The question of subjective versus objective interpretation, the fact that we need to know the history of the historian in order to understand the version that is being put in front of us.”