Quotes from Louis de Bernieres

Visiem zin?ms, ka ?imenes gods ir atkar?gs no t?s sieviešu uzved?bas.

Didn't the secret police know the exact aroma and chemical composition of every subversive fart in Greece?

Neapg?žami ir mor?les principi, nevis zin?tniski fakti.

All of my joys have been pulled out of my mouth like teeth. All my home is nothing but sadness and silence and ruin and memory. I have been reduced, I am my own ghost, all my own beauty and youth have shrilled away, there are no illusions of happiness to impel me. Life is a prison of poverty and aborted dreams, it is nothing but a slow progress to my place beneath the soil.

She tried to control herself rigidly, saying to herself, I won't look at him for another half hour. But all to no avail. She would sneak a glimpse, his eyes would flicker, and there she would be again, imprisoned by an amused smile and a raised eyebrow.

Don't give in to him at all. Deny yourself. Because then your eyes will not be clouded by a madness that you cannot control, and then you will be able to learn to see him as he is.

foolish,' even though I didn't want to touch

The self-anointed superior races, drunk on Darwin and nationalist hyperbole, besotted with eugenics and beguiled by myth, were winding up machines of genocide that soon would be unleashed upon a world already weary to the heart of such infinite foolery and contemptible vainglory.

bear in mind that this time around it was impossible to become a senior officer by merit alone; it was done by browning the tongue.

has sometimes occurred to me that God only bestows extreme beauty upon those to whom He wishes to bring misfortune.

There is nothing so good and lovely as when man and wife in their home dwell together in unity of mind and disposition.

Half of these Jews are Muslim by religion, since their ancestors fell into disillusionment after the failures of a local seventeenth-century messiah.

What's the matter with you? How can you, a musician, an educated man, come here with your mandolin and make beautiful tunes to a Greek, when all around you the island is pillaged and despoiled? And don't give me any of that shit about the restoration of the Roman Empire. If you really want to know, it was Greece that educated Rome, and we didn't do it by conquest either. What's the matter with you?

I am ashamed. I play a diminshed chord because I am diminished.

I am ashamed. I play a diminished chord because I am diminished.

It was now possible to wake up in the morning and be amazed and grateful to be yet alive and living in a solid house, and to go to bed at night full of relief at having lived a commonplace and uneventful day.

Love delayed is lust augmented.

I do not want you to believe any of this because it is all crap, but it is the crap in which the piles of our psuedo-European culture are embedded, so you had better understand it because no one who does not understand the history and taxonomy of crap will ever come to know the difference between crap and pseudocrap and noncrap....

I used to have nightmare about having petrol poured over me, and being set on fire, and nowadays I have nightmares that I have wooden teeth and that they are continually falling out, as if I had an infinite number of them. It seems that everyone has their own inexplicable fear to have nightmares about. We need nightmares to keep ourselves entertained, and fend off the contentment that we all fear and abhor so much.

Dr Iannis had enjoyed a satisfactory day in which none of his patients had died or got any worse.

Life is nothing if not a random motion of coincidences and quirks of chance; it never goes as planned or as foretold; frequently one gains happiness from being obliged to follow an unchosen path or misery from following a chosen one.

she realised suddenly that there was something about music that had never been revealed to her before: it was not merely the production of sweet sound; it was, to those who understood it, an emotional and intellectual odyssey.

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. Louis de Bernieres as quoted in Underland by Robert Macfarlane.

God is an oppressor, He is incapable of human sympathy; behind a smiling face He hides an evil heart.