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

Categorized in : World Stranger Passing

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

sad-love being-in-love art

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.

Louis de Bernieres

roots tree two

...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.

Louis de Bernieres

ignorance stupid ideas

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

Louis de Bernieres

causes fear remember

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

Louis de Bernieres

passionate focus children

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.

Louis de Bernieres

marriage love romantic

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.

Louis de Bernieres

hurt beautiful world

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.

Louis de Bernieres

sad-love romantic art

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

Louis de Bernieres

real kindness civilization

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

stupid love-is long

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

Louis de Bernieres

united-states meals people

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

Louis de Bernieres

wings bird men

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

Louis de Bernieres

has-beens soldier men

The human heart likes a little disorder in its geometry.

Louis de Bernieres

likes heart littles

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

Louis de Bernieres

strange should world

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

party easter thinking

[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

eye mouths men

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.

Louis de Bernieres

ambition trouble thinking

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

Louis de Bernieres

insomnia night thinking

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

sublime beautiful reality