Louis De Bernières Quotes

“Don’t have any silly ideas about soldiers. Soldiers have mothers, you know, and most of us end up as farmers and fishermen like everyone else.”

“We lost the war and were saved only when the Germans invaded from Bulgaria and opened a second front that the Greeks had no resources to defend.”

“I, Carlo Piero Guercio, testify that in the Army I found my family.”

“We fought and froze and died for the sake of an empire that has no purpose.”

“He does not know that the ultimate truth is that history ought to consist only of the anecdotes of the little people who are caught up in it.”

“For Lemoni there would be no freedom until widowhood, which was precisely the time when the community would turn against her, as though she had no right to outlive a husband, as though he had died only because of his wife’s negligence.”

“He reached a finger to twirl his moustache, experienced a peculiar irritation when he remembered that he had shaved it off as a gesture of defiance against Hitler, and then looked down at the black armband that he had worn ever since the death of Metaxas.”

“You have to be firm with these people, or they start doing what they like.”

“You must allow Pelagia to become a doctor. She is not only my daughter. She is, since I have no son, the nearest to a son that I have fathered.”

“I just don’t understand why an artist like you would descend to being a soldier.”

“We were new and beautiful, we loved each other more than brothers, that’s for sure. What spoiled it always was that none of us knew why we were in Albania, none of us had an easy conscience about this rebuilding of the Roman Empire.”

“Do you think you can so easily erase our history? Are you so stupid that you think that we will forget what it said?”

“I know that she will never tell me that she is waiting for a new world where a Greek may love an Italian and think nothing of it.”

“Do you think I don’t understand economics? How many times do I have to explain . . . Fascist economics are immune from the cyclic disturbances of capitalism?”

“If there was such a thing as a doctor who was also a woman. She toyed with the idea, and then went to look for a paintbrush, as though this action could cancel the uncomfortable sensation of having been born into the wrong world.”

“Dr. Iannis had enjoyed a satisfactory day in which none of his patients had died or got any worse.”

“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.”

“She must have a son’s prerogatives, because she will continue my life when I am gone. I have not brought her up to be a domestic slave, for the simple reason that such company would have been tedious in the absence of a son.”

“We should care for each other more than we care for ideas.”

“As she reached for it she realized for the first time, and with a small shock, that she had learned enough from her father over the years to become a doctor herself.”