Quotes from Louis de Bernieres

Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident.

War is wonderful, until someone is killed.

He was like one of those saprophytic orchids that can create harmony and wonder even as it grows and blossoms on a pile of shit, in a place of skulls and bones. He let his rifle rust, and even los it once or twice, but he won battles armes with nothing but a mandolin. (195-196)

If I teach you reading and writing, I'm warning you I've got to hit you on the head and call you bad names when you're stupid, because that's how you do teaching.

Soldiers planted like vegetables waiting for the day of harvest. … everything is more intense at night, perfectly beautiful, and when the wind shifts and the reek of rotting meat vanishes for a few blessed minutes you can smell the sweet scent of the countryside.

The moral of the story was that if you can talk, it's better not to tell the truth.

Sergeant Pietro Oliva was a good Catholic. He liked to go into a church and cross himself, genuflect to the alter, and then settle down to a little prayer and contemplation, savouring the coolness, the heavy odours, the darkness, and the sensation of being soaked in the atmosphere of centuries' worth of devotion that hung in the tenebrous and golden air of churches.

Psipsina emerged from inside the tunic, and jumped up on the table in order to curl up inside the cap, which had been her favourite resting place ever since she discovered the joys of contortionism; she filled it and overflowed from it in such a tangle and jumble of whiskers, ears, tail and paws that it was impossible to tell which part of her was which, and she slept in it because it reminded her of gifts of salami and chicken skins.

Only an island as lackadaisical as this would allow itself to be infested by such troupes of casual and impertinent goats.

she understood that nothing is less obvious in a man than that which seems unquestionable.

The truth is that the mountains are a place where you can find whatever you want just by looking, as long as you remember that they do not suffer fools gladly and particularly dislike those with preconceived ideas.

Love is what is left when the passion has gone

The dead can read tears.

as the human race is incapable of learning anything from history.

to believe there's so many dogs that all look the same.' Nancy smiled to herself. Red Dog was everybody's dog now

The only ones worse off than us is borstal boys. Or those boys that get sent to public school, because if you think about it, them schools are really just posh borstal.

And the priest will say, 'This is a matter of the Devil and not of God,' and I will reply, 'Did God not make the Devil? Is He not omniscient? How can I be blamed for what He knew would occur from the very commencement of time?

It seems that age folds the heart in on itself.

This was the age when everyone wanted an empire and felt entitled to one, days of innocence perhaps, before the world realised, it it yet has, that empires were pointless and expensive, and their subject peoples rancorous and ungrateful.

Madonna Maria, Dottore, please tell me some lies. I am not Pinocchio. The truth will make us free. We overcome by looking it in the eyes.

the devilish false idols of nationalism, that specious patriotism of the morally stunted

But Jack is not offended; he has a sense of his place in the world, and a sensible man expects snooty people to be snooty

It was a question above all of personal and national honour, because the important thing was that Greece should come through this trial without the slightest imputation of turpitude. When soldiers are dead, when a country is devastated and destroyed, it is honour that survives and endures. It is honour that breathes life into the corpse when evil times have passed.

He does not know that the ultimate truth is that history ought to consist only of the anecdotes of the little people who are caught up in it.