Quotes from Louis de Bernieres

Pelagia put her hands on her hips, taking advantage of the superiority implicit in the fact that she was standing and he lying down.

The only thing more pitiful than a middle-aged punk is a white Rastafarian. I did meet one of those once, and he was lonelier than I was.

Britain really is an immense lunatic asylum. That is one of the things that distinguishes us among the nations. We have a very flexible conception of normality.

bottles and ate the glass? Maria, who thought that she was

This is a very ancient land, and we've had nothing but slaughter for two thousand years. Sacrifices, wars, murders, nothing but bad deaths. We've got so many places full of bitter ghosts that anyone who goes near them or lives in them becomes heartless or insane. I don't believe in God, Captain, and I'm not superstitious, but I do believe in ghosts.

The goat herder was so unaccustomed to human company that he was short of words even in his inner speech. It was common knowledge that the Yugoslavs hated each other more than they could ever hate a foreigner or an invader. A guilty man wishes only to be understood, because to be understood is to appear to be forgiven. Atrocities are something nothing less than the vengeance of the tormented. The human heart likes a little disorder in its geometry. Love delayed is lust augmented.

nationalism and religion as the unholy spouses from whose fetid conjugal bed nothing but evil can crawl forth

I had to live among them secretly, like one who conceals leprosy.

half Scottish, respectable, and imbued with the powerful emotional restraint that those races have inherited somehow (via God knows what route) from the Spartans. It was a matter of self-conquest, refusal to show weakness, refusal to become a burden to others. This inheritance does not diminish one's natural sympathies, it merely makes them harder to express and to receive, and it is a legacy which it is extremely hard to unlearn.

There comes a point in life where each one of us who survives begins to feel like a ghost that has forgotten to die at the right time, and certainly most of us were more amusing when we were young. It seems that age folds the heart in on itself. Some of us walk detached, dreaming on the past, and some of us realize that we have lost the trick of standing in the sun.

every man needs an obsession in order to enjoy life, and it was so much the better if that obsession was constructive.

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.

If you have been embroiled in a war in which you confidently expected to die, what were you supposed to do with so much life unexpectedly left over? There were so many ways of passing the peace, and you would never know what they would have been like, those roads not taken.

Love enters by the eyes and also leaves by the eyes.

People always think that if they are expert at something, that thing must therefore be extremely important.

The mayor was also the local policeman, which meant that only one man needed to be bribed rather than two... The community was proud that he was their mayor and their policeman even though he had sold his neice to Pedro the Grocer for one hundred and twenty-two words.

I've been in love often enough to be completely exhausted by it, and not to know what it means any more. When you look back afterwards, you can always find another way of putting it. You say, I was obsessed, it was really lust, I was fooling myself, because after you've recovered from being in love, you always decide that that wasn't what it was.

Monogamy was an invention of men who wished to reduce the power of women over them.

They say that, for a madman, every day is a holiday, but they also say that insanity has seventy gates.

Machinery was so much easier to deal with than people. There was always a precise set of reasons why a machine may not be working, and there were always completely logical solutions. People were slippery and elusive, changeable and moody. You thought you understood them and then found out that you did not. You thought they loved you, and then they suddenly turned spiteful or indifferent.

It was said that there was a smile at the corners of his lips from the moment of his birth, and from early boyhood he was a specialist in in appropriate interjections.

He did not ask me to shoot him; perhaps at the very end he loved his vanishing life.

It's true,' said Rosie. 'No one is ever only one thing. Inside one person there are so many different people, and quite often they're at war with each other, and sometimes one of them is winning, and sometimes another. We're all so hard to understand, aren't we? I don't even understand myself. It'd be so much easier to be a dog, don't you think? Or one of these donkeys? I just wish so much...

You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs,' quoted Kokolios, looking at Stamatis significantly. 'I don't like your omelette,' said Stamatis. 'It's made with bad eggs, it tastes foul, and it makes me shit.' (62)