Quotes from Louis de Bernieres

He showed his daughter how to use cushions to vary his position and relieve the monotony of pressure that corrupts the flesh, but he made her leave the room for all those tasks which would normally fall to the lot of a woman, and which show the greatest love.

Inside, the doctor filled an eyedropper with goat milk and began to drip it into the back of the marten's throat. It filled him with immense medical satisfaction when eventually it urinated on the knee of his trousers. This indicated healthy renal functioning.

Promise me one thing. He nodded and she continued, Whenever you are about to do something terrible, think of me, and then don't do it.

And science is about facts, and morality is about values. They are not the same thing and they don't grow together. No one can find a value on the slide of a microscope.

Dolphins love each other so romantically, so playfully, so completely, that it is obvious that they are sent by God to teach us by their example to do the same.

I am not a cynic, but I do know that history is the propaganda of the victors.

each of them was better together than either of them could have been apart.

A German plans a month in advance what his bowel movements will be at Easter, and the British plan everything in retrospect, so it always looks as though everything occurred as they intended. The French plan everything whilst appearing to be having a party, and the Spanish Ã¢â'¬Â¦ well, God knows. Anyway

Thus the headstrong German Shepherd dog, Fritz, and Moritz, the Barbaryy ape, innocently and gallantly defending his mate, plunge Greece into a political void.

Mustafa Kemal drily reminds his co-conspirators that the object is not to die for the revolution, but to live for it.

All war is fratricide, and there is therefore an infinite chain of blame that winds its circuitous route back and forth across the path and under the feet of every people and every nation, so that a people who are the victims of one time become the victimisers a generation later, and newly liberated nations resort immediately to the means of their former oppressors.

He read his own obituary and an editorial lamenting his demise and praising his fortitude and immediately began to think up witty ways of writing to the paper to announce his continued and uninterrupted existence. The other two joined in the game with enthusiasm, and soon all three of them were howling with laughter and emptying bottles at a rate which would have alarmed even a depressed Scandinavian.

the general trouble with ignorance is always that ignorant people have no idea that that's what they are. You can be ignorant and stupid and go through your whole life without ever encountering any evidence against the hypothesis that you're a genius. If you're stupid you can always blame miscalculation on bad luck.

That is morality,I make myself imagine that it is personal.

Christmas is such a trial,' said Mrs McCosh. 'I do most sincerely wish the Lord had been born at some other time.

no one is more truly themselves than when they are sick or injured. That's when the qualities come out.

Madame will forgive me for not perceiving her busyness. It is a sign of the highest breeding to be able to be busy whilst appearing idle to the uninformed observer.

You can't be pretty forever, you know that? But you can always be beautiful.

One is only young once, but in her case it was once too often.

Their trade was not life, but death. They have eaten the fruit of the tree they grew for others to eat.

Socrates stared abjectly at his right foot, which it had become too much of an ordeal to move. He summoned up an effort of will which, to his consternation, moved one of his forefingers. He tried to make the effort of will to stop it, but could not make the effort of will to make the effort of will. Locked into an infinite regress of incapacity, he stood absolutely still and retreated into the kaleidoscope of unconnected images behind his eyes. One of the nuns wiped a tear from his face

If I had lived my life in the consciousness of this death, everything would have been different.

I would say to the priest that God made me as I am, that I had no choice, that He must have made me like this for a purpose, that He knows the ultimate reasons for all things and that therefore it must be all to the good that I am as I am, even if we cannot know what that good is. I can say to the priest that if God is the reason for all things, then God is to blame and I should not be condemned.

Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Your mother and I had it, we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossom had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two. But sometimes the petals fall away and the roots have not entwined.