Louis de Bernières Quotes

Love delayed is lust augmented.

Did you know that childhood is the only time in our lives when insanity is not only permitted to us, but expected?

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

Men are sometimes driven by things that to a women make no sense, but she did know that Corelli had to be with his boys. Honour and common sense; in the light of the other, both of them are ridiculous.

No man is a man until he has been a soldier.

The dead can read tears.

Don't give into 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. Do you understand?

Love is a temporary madness; it erupts like volcanoes and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of eternal passion. That is just being in love, which any fool can do. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Those that truly love have roots that grow towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossoms have fallen from their branches, they find that they are one tree and not two.” ~Louis de Bernieres

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.

Fascism is fundamentally and at bottom an aesthetic conception, and . . . it is your function as creators of beautiful things to portray with the greatest efficacy the sublime beauty and inevitable reality of the Fascist ideal.

Women only nag when they feel unappreciated.

There is only one thing worse than losing the one you love, and that is losing them without knowing why. If you are a dog, then your master is like a god to you, and the pain of losing him is greater still.

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

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

Remember that fear causes to happen the very things it fears. That's why fear should be unknown to us.

Love is a temporary madness, it erupts like volcanoes and then subsides. And when it subsides, you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion, it is not the desire to mate every second minute of the day, it is not lying awake at night imagining that he is kissing every cranny of your body. No, don't blush, I am telling you some truths. That is just being "in love", which any fool can do. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident.

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.

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