89 Quotes by Louis de Bernières

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.

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

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.

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

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.

...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.

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.

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 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.