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87a24a6
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Women only nag when they feel unappreciated.
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Louis de Bernières |
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37b9c6b
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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 conv..
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Louis de Bernières |
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39595b2
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Did you know that childhood is the only time in our lives when insanity is not only permitted to us, but expected?
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insanity
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Louis de Bernières |
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9aefb36
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We should care for each other more than we care for ideas, or else we will end up killing each other.
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Louis de Bernières |
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2e75c5b
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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.
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Louis de Bernières |
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dda5265
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Symmetry is only a property of dead things. Did you ever see a tree or a mountain that was symmetrical? It's fine for buildings, but if you ever see a symmetrical human face, you will have the impression that you ought to think it beautiful, but that in fact you find it cold. The human heart likes a little disorder in its geometry, Kyria Pelagia. Look at your face in a mirror, Signorina, and you will see that one eyebrow is a little higher ..
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Louis de Bernières |
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42844fb
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History is the propaganda of the victors.
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Louis de Bernières |
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bcd9197
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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 Gr..
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generalizations
greeks
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Louis de Bernières |
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d0c2f0e
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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. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the desire to mate every second of the day. It is not lying awake at night im..
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Louis de Bernières |
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fe1e2cf
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Man is a bird without wings and a bird is a man without sorrow.
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Louis de Bernières |
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d616f48
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Your lips are like sugar And your cheeks an apple Your breasts are paradise And your body a lily. O, to kiss the sugar To bite the apple To reveal paradise And open the lily.
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love
philothei
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Louis de Bernières |
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cb4cbb9
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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.
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Louis de Bernières |
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1990e80
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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.
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Louis de Bernières |
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b006460
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Love is a temporary madness, it erupts like volcanoes and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have 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 fool can do. Love itself i..
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madness
love
movies
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Louis de Bernières |
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c1d53f4
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The garden where you sit Has never a need of flowers, For you are the blossoms And only a fool or the blind Would fail to know it
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Louis de Bernières |
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7382800
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How strange that the world should change because of words, and words change because of the world
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Louis de Bernières |
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f5a4921
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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.
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Louis de Bernières |
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28c62ed
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Every Greek, man, woman, and child, has to two Greeks inside. We even have technical terms for them. They are a part of us, as inevitable as the fact that we all write poetry and the fact that every single one of us thinks that he knows everything that there is to know. We are all hospitable to strangers, we all are nostalgic for something, our mothers all treat their grown sons like babies, our sons all treat their mothers a sacred and bea..
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greeks
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Louis de Bernières |
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940e43c
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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 w..
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Louis de Bernières |
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c6987e1
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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?
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madness
waiting
patience
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Louis de Bernières |
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e4324ca
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You and I once fancied ourselves birds, and we were happy even when we flapped our wings and fell down and bruised ourselves, but the truth is that we were birds without wings. You were a robin ad I was a blackbird, and there were some who were eagles, or vultures, or pretty goldfinches, but none of us had wings. For birds with wings nothing changes; they fly where they will and they know nothing about borders and their quarrels are very sm..
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Louis de Bernières |
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94514ab
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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.
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philosophy
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Louis de Bernières |
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175f898
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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 t..
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Louis de Bernières |
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2ed0672
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No man is a man until he has been a soldier.
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war
soldiers
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Louis de Bernières |
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e81b971
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He gets into the habit of thinking so passionately at night that he begins to be persecuted by insomnia.
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Louis de Bernières |
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ce2c3d2
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All their lovers' talk began with the phrase "After the war". After the war, when we're married, shall we live in Italy? There are nice places. My father thinks I wouldn't like it, but I would. As long as I'm with you. After the war, if we have a girl, can we call her Lemoni? After the war, if we've a son, we've got to call him Iannis. After the war, I'll speak to the children in Greek, and you can seak to them in Italian, and that way they..
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war
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Louis de Bernières |
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9ba5c50
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That's how a woman wins a mans heart, by making him think that he amuses her.
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Louis de Bernières |
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1f407f7
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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.
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eloquently-put
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Louis de Bernières |
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462f9cd
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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.
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beauty
art
fascism
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Louis de Bernières |
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5d45cce
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Since I encountered death, met death on every mountain path,conversed with death in my sleep, wrestled with death in the snow, gambled at dice with death, I have come to the conclusion that death is not an enemy but a brother. Death is a beautiful naked man who looks like Apollo, and he is notsatisfied with those who wither away in old age. Death is a perfectionist, he likes the young and beautiful, he wants to stroke our hair and caress th..
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Louis de Bernières |
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ea2418e
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Money has no religion except itself.
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religion
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Louis de Bernières |
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0fb659b
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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.
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Louis de Bernières |
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b413ccb
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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.
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Louis de Bernières |
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ad9d6b3
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I have been driven to search everywhere just to find myself mentioned. I am mentioned almost nowhere, but where I find myself, I find myself condemned.
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Louis de Bernières |
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c25371e
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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.
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men
women
honor
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Louis de Bernières |
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0c944d1
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He showed his daughter how to use cushions to vary his position and relieve the monotony of pressure that corrupts the flesh, but he made her leave the room for all those tasks which would normally fall to the lot of a woman, and which show the greatest love.
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Louis de Bernières |
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bdd52e0
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What do you learn at school, then?" "We learn about the Prophet and his three hundred authenticated miracles,and about Abraham and Isaac and Jonah and Omar and Ali and Hind and Fatima and the saints, and sometimes the big battles of Saladin against the barbarians. And we recite the Holy Koran because we have to learn al-Fatihah by heart." "What's that?" "It's the beginning." "What's it like?" Karatavuk closed his eyes and recited:'Bismillah..
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Louis de Bernières |
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282c9d1
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Love is a kind of dementia with very precise and oft-repeated clinical symptoms.
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Louis de Bernières |
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3f7525e
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each of them was better together than either of them could have been apart.
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Louis de Bernières |
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461132e
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Dolphins love each other so romantically, so playfully, so completely, that it is obvious that they are sent by God to teach us by their example to do the same.
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Louis de Bernières |
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c3da266
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Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away.
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love
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Louis de Bernières |
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e4fe2a5
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In those days Great Britain was less wealthy than it is now, but it was also less complacent, and considerably less useless. It had a sense of humanitarian responsibility and a myth of its own importance that was quixotically true and universally accepted merely because it believed in it, and said so in a voice loud enough for foreigners to understand. It had not yet acquired the schoolboy habit of waiting for months for permission from Was..
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Louis de Bernières |
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b365757
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Thus the headstrong German Shepherd dog, Fritz, and Moritz, the Barbaryy ape, innocently and gallantly defending his mate, plunge Greece into a political void.
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Louis de Bernières |
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2c537fa
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Mustafa Kemal drily reminds his co-conspirators that the object is not to die for the revolution, but to live for it.
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Louis de Bernières |