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Corelli's Mandolin QUOTES

Corelli's Mandolin QUOTES

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

― Louis de Bernières , Corelli's Mandolin

2 " Women only nag when they feel unappreciated. "

― Louis de Bernières , Corelli's Mandolin

3 " 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 Bernières , Corelli's Mandolin

4 " 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. "

― Louis de Bernières , Corelli's Mandolin

5 " That is morality,I make myself imagine that it is personal. "

― Louis de Bernières , Corelli's Mandolin

6 " Did you know that childhood is the only time in our lives when insanity is not only permitted to us, but expected? "

― Louis de Bernières , Corelli's Mandolin

7 " 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? "

― Louis de Bernières , Corelli's Mandolin

8 " And the priest will say, ‘This is a matter of the Devil and not of God,’ and I will reply, ‘Did God not make the Devil? Is He not omniscient? How can I be blamed for what He knew would occur from the very commencement of time? "

― Louis de Bernières , Corelli's Mandolin

9 " We live in a perpetual daze. The snow has made everything unrecognisable so that we never know where we are. Is this the escarpment we were told to take? Is that a stream in that valley floor, somewhere six feet below the shimmering cloak of white? What mountain is that? Someone strip away the cloud, for the love of God, so that we can tell. Is this a road we are floundering upon, or a river? Don't worry, we'll know when we reach the source. Don't worry, if we go to the wrong place we might be captured, with any luck. (138-139) "

― Louis de Bernières , Corelli's Mandolin

10 " He was like one of those saprophytic orchids that can create harmony and wonder even as it grows and blossoms on a pile of shit, in a place of skulls and bones. He let his rifle rust, and even los it once or twice, but he won battles armes with nothing but a mandolin. (195-196) "

― Louis de Bernières , Corelli's Mandolin

11 " The half-forgotten island of Cephallonia rises improvidently and inadvisedly from the Ionian Sea; it is an island so immense in antiquity that the very rocks themselves exhale nostalgia and the red earth lies stupefied not only by the sun, but by the impossible weight of memory. "

― Louis de Bernières , Corelli's Mandolin

12 " One should not, after "

― Louis de Bernières , Corelli's Mandolin

13 " 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. "

― Louis de Bernières , Corelli's Mandolin

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

― Louis de Bernières , Corelli's Mandolin

15 " [...] she understood that nothing is less obvious in a man than that which seems unquestionable. "

― Louis de Bernières , Corelli's Mandolin

16 " a few sagging houses whose stones had lost their mortar and were held together only by gravity and habit, "

― Louis de Bernières , Corelli's Mandolin

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

― Louis de Bernières , Corelli's Mandolin

18 " Symmetry is only a property of dead things. "

― Louis de Bernières , Corelli's Mandolin

19 " Love is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have become 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 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. Your mother and I had it, we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossom had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two. "

― Louis de Bernières , Corelli's Mandolin

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

― Louis de Bernières , Corelli's Mandolin