Best 50 quotes of Louis De Bernieres on MyQuotes

An adversarial family law system raises the stakes unnecessarily high, exacerbates the antagonism of the couples concerned, and is directly responsible for making it impossible for couples who would otherwise have reconciled to do so.

Beauty is precious, you see, and the more beautiful something is, the more precious it is; and the more precious it is the more it hurts us that it will fade away; and the more we are hurt by beauty, the more we love the world.

...but then the general trouble with ignorance is always that the ignorant person has 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.

Compared to a novel, a film is like an economy pizza where there are no olives, no ham, no anchovies, no mushrooms, and all you’ve got is the dough.

Family law is institutionally anti-male. I've been lobbying MPs, and I'm not going to give up campaigning for equality until I get equality.

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

He gets into the habit of thinking so passionately at night that he begins to be persecuted by insomnia.

History is the propaganda of the victors.

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.

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.

In reality the world is as full of bad mothers as it is of bad fathers, and it is not the motherless children who become delinquent but the fatherless ones.

It's stupid to claim that one human being is special, or picked out by God, when in fact there are hundreds of millions of human beings in the world, and God knows how many millions of people long dead who have been lost to history, all of whom were probably special to someone.

Like many men, I am not ashamed to admit that my principal joys are domestic. I love cooking, and I love looking after my children. Indeed, the times that I have with them are the only ones when I feel unconditionally happy.

Love is a kind of dementia with very precise and oft-repeated clinical symptoms.

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.

Love is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake and then subsides.

Love is not breathlessness; It is not excitement; It is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion. 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, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident.

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

Man is a bird without wings and a bird is a man without sorrow.

People taking photographs of their meals are not critics; they are from the United States.

[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.

So the news that divorced fathers are to be denied a legal right to a relationship with their children, in the long overdue review of family law published this week, fills me with horror and despair.

The De Bernières were very military. I broke the military tradition but I was terribly proud of my father being a soldier.

The garden where you sit Has never a need of flowers, For you are the blossoms And only a fool or the blind Would fail to know it

The human heart likes a little disorder in its geometry.

The real index of civilization is when people are kinder than they need to be.

The trouble with fulfilling your ambitions is you think you will be transformed into some sort of archangel and you're not. You still have to wash your socks.

We have roots that grow towards each other underground. And when all the pretty blossom has fallen from our branches we find that we are one tree and not two.

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

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.

When you have children it completely shifts your focus; they become the most passionate love of your life...

Women only nag when they feel unappreciated.

Your lips are like sugar And your cheeks an apple Your breasts are paradise And your body a lily. O, to kiss the sugar To bite the apple To reveal paradise And open the lily.

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?

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.

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.

I realised that I had set so many of my novels and stories abroad, because custom had prevented me from seeing how exotic my own country is. Britain really is an immense lunatic asylum. That is one of the things that distinguishes us among the nations... We are rigid and formal in some ways, but we believe in the right to eccentricity, as long as the eccentricities are large enough... Woe betide you if you hold your knife incorrectly, but good luck to you if you wear a loincloth and live up a tree.

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 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. 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.

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

Madame will forgive me for not perceiving her busyness. It is a sign of the highest breeding to be able to be busy whilst appearing idle to the uninformed observer.

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.

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

No one is every 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.

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

Psipsina emerged from inside the tunic, and jumped up on the table in order to curl up inside the cap, which had been her favourite resting place ever since she discovered the joys of contortionism; she filled it and overflowed from it in such a tangle and jumble of whiskers, ears, tail and paws that it was impossible to tell which part of her was which, and she slept in it because it reminded her of gifts of salami and chicken skins.

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.

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.

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.

The world is bulging with desirable women, as you have no doubt noticed already, but there are some who have a special presence, as if the space they occupy has more intrinsic depth and reality than that of others. These ones are surreptitiously incandescent, they glow with an invisible light reminiscent of mountains, shortly after dawn, in a tropical land. When I encounter one of these, it is like being in a clearing in the Amazon when a jaguar strolls past, sniffing the air, or like going to the front of a boat, looking down into the water, and seeing dolphins curvetting across the bows.