Quotes from Louis de Bernieres

The Cat She was licking The opened tin For hours and hours Without realising That she was drinking Her own blood. -spyros kyriazopoulos

This rule is that people always think that if they are very expert at something, that thing must therefore be extremely important.

I am no philosopher, but I know this. Your religions cause wars and prevent marriages. There will be no peace on earth until every synagogue, every mosque, every church, and every temple is razed to the ground or made into a barn, and when that happens, no one will be happier than the Lord God Himself.

Families embraced more than had been the habit; fathers who expected to be beaten to death stroked the hair of pretty daughters who expected to be raped.

Lord Jesus, Son of God,' he prayed. 'If you're not going to do anything, I will.

the more languages you know, the better you understand your own. He realised that languages divide the world up differently from each other. He was half French, and had often wondered why it was that his French personality was different from his British one. In French he was more emphatic and rhetorical. Somebody had told him once that in Russian there was no word for blue. There was bound to be a word for pushrod, or tappet, though.

Eventually he began to consider that the ordering of his recollections was in fact not the most important thing; what was important was the final memory, the one he deliberately kept 'til last, the one that would be nearest to salvation, the one that blazed with light.

entailment of the family estates, but envisaged for himself

Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away

He noticed that a bedraggled and desiccated pink poppy was growing out of a crack where the wall of the teacher's house intersected with the cobbles of the street.

A todo o momento vejo coisas que gostaria que visses, gostaria que estivesses aqui para as veres com os teus próprios olhos. Procuro ver coisas para ti, e guarda-las na minha memória, e tenho a fantasia de que se me concentrar mesmo muito, posso fazê-las chegar a ti, para que tu as vejas nos teus sonhos. Como se a vida pudesse ser assim.

T? ir mana mor?le. Es piespiežu sevi iedom?ties, ka tas attiecas uz mani person?gi.

few sagging houses whose stones had lost their mortar and were held together only by gravity and habit

He frowned and tutted as he swabbed the vomit from the man's robes, and transferred his irritation to Pelagia's goat, which had entered the room and leapt up onto the table. 'Stupid brute' he shouted at it, and it looked at him impudently with its slotted eyes, as if to say, 'I, at least, am not drunk. I am merely mischievous.

Dz?ve ir cietums, kas b?v?ts no nabadz?bas un nepiepild?tiem sap?iem, t? ir l?na virz?šan?s uz manu vietu zem zemes, t? ir Dieva vilt?ba, lai liktu mums vilties mies?, t? ir tikai ?su br?di degoša liesmi?a e??as trauk? starp vienu tumsu un citu, kas ir t?s gal?.

The silver fish flashed in the sun like new knives, transforming their asphyxiation into a display of beauty as they flicked and leapt against each other and died.

Sapevi che l'infanzia è l'unico periodo della vita in cui la pazzia non è soltanto tollerata, ma prevista?

Symmetry is only a property of dead things.

The half-forgotten island of Cephallonia rises improvidently and inadvisedly from the Ionian Sea; it is an island so immense in antiquity that the very rocks themselves exhale nostalgia and the red earth lies stupefied not only by the sun, but by the impossible weight of memory.

this spirit rebels against the prison that my body has become, and my spirit is like a chrysalis that is ready to burst its shell, and when the shell bursts, it longs to be reborn in paradise

He knew too much to be an optimist, and not enough to relieve his pessimism.

out the effects of the former. Do you think I don't understand economics? How many times do I have to

The pleasure of homecoming is more than recompense for the pains of setting out, and therefore it is always worth departing.

One should not, after