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1 " 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. "
― Louis de Bernières , Birds Without Wings
2 " Mustafa Kemal drily reminds his co-conspirators that the object is not to die for the revolution, but to live for it. "
3 " The dead can read tears. "
4 " It was said that there was a smile at the corners of his lips from the moment of his birth, and from early boyhood he was a specialist in in appropriate interjections. "
5 " It seems that age folds the heart in on itself. "
6 " this spirit rebels against the prison that my body has become, and my spirit is like a chrysalis that is ready to burst its shell, and when the shell bursts, it longs to be reborn in paradise, "
7 " Man is a bird without wings and a bird is a man without sorrow. "
8 " 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. "
9 " How strange that the world should change because of words, and words change because of the world "
10 " 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. "
11 " 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. "
12 " There comes a point in life where each one of us who survives begins to feel like a ghost that has forgotten to die at the right time, and certainly most of us were more amusing when we were young. It seems that age folds the heart in on itself. Some of us walk detached, dreaming on the past, and some of us realize that we have lost the trick of standing in the sun. For many of us the thought of the future is a cause for irritation rather than optimism, as if we have had enough of new things, and wish only for the long sleep that rounds the edges of our lives "
13 " He gets into the habit of thinking so passionately at night that he begins to be persecuted by insomnia. "
14 " That's how a woman wins a mans heart, by making him think that he amuses her. "
15 " 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. "
16 " 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. "
17 " Money has no religion except itself. "
18 " Thus the headstrong German Shepherd dog, Fritz, and Moritz, the Barbaryy ape, innocently and gallantly defending his mate, plunge Greece into a political void. "
19 " 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. "
20 " You can’t be pretty forever, you know that? But you can always be beautiful. "
