Louis-de-Bernieres Quotes

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.

— Louis-de-Bernieres

“Women only nag when they feel unappreciated.”

— Louis-de-Bernieres

“We should care for each other more than we care for ideas, or else we will end up killing each other.”

— Louis-de-Bernieres

“Love is a kind of dementia with very precise and oft-repeated clinical symptoms. You blush in each other's presence, you both hover in places where you expect the other to pass, you are both a little tongue-tied, you both laugh inexplicably and too long, you become quite nauseatingly girlish, and he becomes quite ridiculously gallant. You have also grown a little stupid.”

— Louis-de-Bernieres

History is the propaganda of the victors.

— Louis-de-Bernieres

“Where does it all begin? History has no beginnings, for everything that happens becomes the cause or pretext for what occurs afterwards, and this chain of cause and pretext stretches back to the Palaeolithic age, when the first Cain of one tribe murdered the first Abel of another. All war is fratricide, and there is therefore an infinite chain of blame that winds its circuitous route back and forth across the path and under the feet of every people and every nation, so that a people who are the victims of one time become the victimisers a generation later, and newly liberated nations resort immediately to the means of their former oppressors. The triple contagions of nationalism, utopianism and religious absolutism effervesce together into an acid that corrodes the moral metal of a race, and it shamelessly and even proudly performs deeds that it would deem vile if they were done by any other.”

— Louis-de-Bernieres

“Symmetry is only a property of dead things. Did you ever see a tree or a mountain that was symmetrical? It's fine for buildings, but if you ever see a symmetrical human face, you will have the impression that you ought to think it beautiful, but that in fact you find it cold. The human heart likes a little disorder in its geometry, Kyria Pelagia. Look at your face in a mirror, Signorina, and you will see that one eyebrow is a little higher than the other, that the set of the lid of your left eye is such that the eye is a fraction more open that the other. It is these things that make you both attractive and beautiful, whereas ... otherwise you would be a statue. Symmetry is for God, not for us.”

— Louis-de-Bernieres

“I know you have not thought about it. Italians always act without thinking, it's the glory and the downfall of your civilisation. A German plans a month in advance what his bowel movements will be at Easter, and the British plan everything in retrospect, so it always looks as though everything occurred as they intended. The French plan everything whilst appearing to be having a party, and the Spanish ... well, God knows. Anyway, Pelagia is Greek, that's my point.”

— Louis-de-Bernieres

When you fall in love, it is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake, and then it subsides. And when it subsides, you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots are become 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 desire to mate every second of the day. It is not lying awake at night imagining that he is kissing every part of your body. No ... don't blush. I am telling you some truths. For that is just being in love; which any of us can convince ourselves we are. Love itself is what is left over, when being in love has burned away. Doesn't sound very exciting, does it? But it is!

— Louis-de-Bernieres

“[She] knew that it was not precisely a body that one loved. One loved the man who shone out through the eyes and used its mouth to smile and speak.”

— Louis-de-Bernieres

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

— Louis-de-Bernieres

“So many nominal Christians throughout history, took no notice whatsoever of the key parable of Jesus Christ himself, which taught that you shall love your neighbour as you love yourself, and even those that you have despised and hated are your neighbours. This never made any difference to Christians, since the primary epiphenomena of any religion's foundation are the production and flourishment of hypocrisy, megalomania and psychopathy, and the first casualties of a religion's establishment are the intensions of its founders. One can imagine Jesus and Mohammed glumly comparing notes in paradise, scratching their heads and bemoaning their vain expense of effort and suffering, which resulted only in the construction of two monumental whited sepulchres ...”

— Louis-de-Bernieres

How strange that the world should change because of words, and words change because of the world

— Louis-de-Bernieres

Every Greek, man, woman, and child, has to two Greeks inside. We even have technical terms for them. They are a part of us, as inevitable as the fact that we all write poetry and the fact that every single one of us thinks that he knows everything that there is to know. We are all hospitable to strangers, we all are nostalgic for something, our mothers all treat their grown sons like babies, our sons all treat their mothers a sacred and beat their wives, we all hate solitude, we all try to find out from a stranger whether or not we are related, we all use every long word we know as often as we possibly can, we all go out for a walk in the evening so that we can look over each others' fences, we all think that we are equal to the best. Do you understand?"
The captain was perplexed, "You didn't tell me about the two Greeks inside every Greek."
"I didn't? Well, I must have wandered off the point.

— Louis-de-Bernieres

“Antonio, I speak to you from beyond the grave, in seriousness. I have loved you with all my shameful heart, as much as I once loved Francisco, and I have conquered any envy that I might have felt. If a dead man may have a wish, it is that you should find your future with Pelagia. She is beautiful and sweet, there is no one who deserves you more, and no one else worthy of you. I wish that you will have children together, and I wish that once or twice you will tell them about their Uncle Carlo that they never saw. As for me, I hoist my knapsack on my shoulders and buckle the webbing, I put my arm through the sling of my rifle, and I open the veil to march into the unknown as soldiers always will. Remember me.
Carlo.”

— Louis-de-Bernieres

“In deference to such spectacular carnage it is perhaps perverse to dwell upon one person's death, but we are creatures so constituted that the passing of one friend or one acquaintance has a profounder effect that that of 100,000 strangers. If there is any metaphorical truth in the Jewish proverb that he who saves one life saves the whole world, then there is equal metaphorical truth in the proposition that when one person dies, the whole world dies with them.”

— Louis-de-Bernieres

“I have an opinion about holy war, which in general I must keep to myself. I have no wish to be known as a heretic. It is ... that if a war can be holy, then God cannot. At best a war can only be necessary.”

— Louis-de-Bernieres

“The couple sat side by side on cushions on the floor, quietly eating breakfast from the low table. They munched in happy and enjoyable silence, of the kind that grows like a vine through the long years of a good marriage, so that when everything that needs to be said has already been pronounced, it is mutually understood that there is an intimate silence that has its own loquacity.”

— Louis-de-Bernieres

That's how a woman wins a mans heart, by making him think that he amuses her.

— Louis-de-Bernieres

“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.”

— Louis-de-Bernieres

“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 ...”

— Louis-de-Bernieres

“Love delayed is lust augmented.”

— Louis-de-Bernieres

“Moreover it is one of the greatest curses of religion that it takes only the very slightest twist of a knife tip in the cloth of a shirt to turn neighbours who have loved each other into bitter enemies.”

— Louis-de-Bernieres

“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.”

— Louis-de-Bernieres

“He showed his daughter how to use cushions to vary his position and relieve the monotony of pressure that corrupts the flesh, but he made her leave the room for all those tasks which would normally fall to the lot of a woman, and which show the greatest love.”

— Louis-de-Bernieres

“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.”

— Louis-de-Bernieres

Just bring in the wood before she asks for it, and bring her a flower every time you come back from the field. If it's cold put a shawl around her shoulders, and if it's hot, bring her a glass of water. It's simple. Women only nag when they feel unappreciated. Think of her as your mother who has fallen ill, and treat her accordingly.'(43)

— Louis-de-Bernieres

Inside, the doctor filled an eyedropper with goat milk and began to drip it into the back of the marten's throat. It filled him with immense medical satisfaction when eventually it urinated on the knee of his trousers. This indicated healthy renal functioning.

— Louis-de-Bernieres

He read his own obituary and an editorial lamenting his demise and praising his fortitude and immediately began to think up witty ways of writing to the paper to announce his continued and uninterrupted existence. The other two joined in the game with enthusiasm, and soon all three of them were howling with laughter and emptying bottles at a rate which would have alarmed even a depressed Scandinavian.

— Louis-de-Bernieres

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

— Louis-de-Bernieres

“In those days Great Britain was less wealthy than it is now, but it was also less complacent, and considerably less useless. It had a sense of humanitarian responsibility and a myth of its own importance that was quixotically true and universally accepted merely because it believed in it, and said so in a voice loud enough for foreigners to understand. It had not yet acquired the schoolboy habit of waiting for months for permission from Washington before it clambered out of its post-imperial bed, put on its boots, made a sugary cup of tea, and ventured through the door.”

— Louis-de-Bernieres

Dionisio arose reluctantly from his bed, went to the window to see what kind of day it was, and went to the telephone to call the police.

— Louis-de-Bernieres

“Quite often the dolphins save the lives of those who are drowning, and sometimes they dolphins make a mistake and try to save those who are not drowning at all but are really diving for turtles. That is something that one just has to put up with from time to time, and it serves to prove how simpatico the animals are.”

— Louis-de-Bernieres

“For the bird that cannot soar, God has provided low branches.”

— Louis-de-Bernieres

“There was between 1821 and 1913 a prolonged and atrocious holocaust which we have chosen to forget, and from which we have learned absolutely nothing. In 1821, between 26 March and Easter Sunday, in the name of liberty, the southern Greek Christians tortured and
massacred 15,000 Greek Muslim civilians, looted their possessions, and burned their dwellings. The Greek hero Kolokotronis boasted without qualm that so many were the corpses that his horse's hooves never had to touch the
ground between the town gates of Athens and the citadel. In the Peloponnese, many thousands of Muslims, mainly women and children, were rounded up and butchered. Thousands of shrines and mosques were destroyed, so that even now there are only one or two left in the whole of Greece.”

— Louis-de-Bernieres

“Eventually, in an historic feat of compromise, democracy was restored by the abolition of elections..”

— Louis-de-Bernieres

“What's the news of the war?' The doctor twisted the ends of his moustache and said, 'Germany is taking everything, the Italians are playing the fool, the French have run away, the Belgians have been overrun whilst they were looking the other way, the Poles have been charging tanks with cavalry, the Americans have been playing baseball, the British have been drinking tea and adjusting their monocles, the Russians have been sitting on their hands except when voting unanimously to do whatever they are told. Thank God we are out of it. Why don't we turn on the radio?”

— Louis-de-Bernieres

Their trade was not life, but death. They have eaten the fruit of the tree they grew for others to eat.

— Louis-de-Bernieres

“Do you know the strangest thing about being a soldier? It is that you are repeatedly ordered to commit suicide. and you obey.”

— Louis-de-Bernieres

“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.”

— Louis-de-Bernieres

“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.”

— Louis-de-Bernieres

“It sometimes happens that in relatively powerless and impoverished countries there arise men of enormous vision who are frustrated and offended by the limitations of their lives and seek to reach out for the stars on behalf of themselves and their nations.”

— Louis-de-Bernieres

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

— Louis-de-Bernieres

“No one is more truly themselves than when they are sick or injured. That's when the qualities come out. And”

— Louis-de-Bernieres

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

— Louis-de-Bernieres

“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.”

— Louis-de-Bernieres

Roza didn't want to go, and she made the woman promise to let her ride the horse again. It was apparently called "Russia" because it was very big, a complete liability, and always going where it wasn't wanted.

— Louis-de-Bernieres

“Me? I'm not lazy, I'm just passionate about leisure.”

— Louis-de-Bernieres

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.

— Louis-de-Bernieres

“One is only young once, but in her case it was once to often.”

— Louis-de-Bernieres