Quotes from Ken Follett

When people are perfectly polite, it usually means they don't really care. A little awkwardness is more sincere.

Culture clash is terrific drama

Why is it that those who want to destroy everything good about their country are the quickest to waive the national flag?

Marriage is a promise. You can't keep a promise only when it suits you. You have to keep it against your inclination. That's what it means.

In every country, those who were against war had been overruled. The Austrians had attacked Serbia when they might have held back; the Russians had mobilized instead of negotiating; the Germans had refused to attend an international conference to settle the issue; the French had been offered the chance to remain neutral and had spurned it; and now the British were about to join in when they might easily have remained on the sidelines.

Why did people manufacture trouble when there was already so much of it in the world?

He had been granted his life's wish-but conditionally.

Moderates always seem to deal in hopes rather than in facts.

His talent was to express his readers' most stupid and ignorant prejudices as if they made sense, so that the shameful seemed respectable. That was why they bought the paper.

He had seen - clever, clever boy that he was - that she could not be won by wooing; and he had approached her sidelong, as a friend rather than a lover, meeting her in the woods and telling her stories and making her love him without her noticing.

In both cases, weakness and scruples had defeated strength and ruthlessness.

A waiter appeared, and Gus said: "Bring coffee for my guests, please, and a plate of ham sandwiches." He deliberately did not ask them what they wanted. He had seen Woodrow Wilson act like this with people he wanted to intimidate.

You're a queer?" "That's exactly what I am. I didn't choose to be." After a while Woody put his arm around Chuck's shoulders. "Well, what the hell," he said. "At least you're not a Republican.

What news? There's nothing to tell. I'm a nun.

Mam kissed Ethel and said: "I'm glad to see you settled at last, anyway," That word ANYWAY carried a lot of baggage, Ethel thought. It meant: "Congratulations, even though you're a fallen woman, and you've got an illegitmate child whose father no one knows, and you're marrying a Jew, and living in London, which is the same as Sodom and Gomorrah." But Ethel accepted Mam's qualified blessing and vowed never to say such things to her own child.

The trouble with being inspired to perform the impossible was that the inspiration gave you no clues to the practical means.

A lark, caught in a hunter's net Sang sweeter then than ever, As if the falling melody Might wing and net dissever At dusk the hunter took his prey, The lark his freedom never. All birds and men are sure to die But songs may live forever.

The first casualty of a civil war was justice, Philip had realized.

Marvelous, isn't it, how these Germans can shoot back at us even when they're fucking dead.

Que Dios nos libre de los hombres con un destino dictado por la voluntad divina

The small boys came early to the hanging.

But desperate people find courage.

They did not suspect her for a moment. It did not occur to them that a woman could be dangerous. How foolish they were. Women could do most of the things men did. Who was left in charge when the men were fighting wars, or going on crusades? There were women carpenters, dyers, tanners, bakers and brewers.

Americans talked about voters the same way Russians talked about Stalin. They had to be obeyed.