Ken Follett

“You never get cheered for telling people the situation is not as simple as they think.”

“When you've lost everything, you've got nothing to lose.”

“The small boys came early to the hanging.”

“I loved it, couldn't stop reading, I learnt many more things of medieval time.”

“Little things please little minds.”

“He was like a man who has got used to drinking the finest wine, and now finds that everyday wine thats like vinegar.”

“Everything in Tom's cathedral looked as if it was meant to be. Perhaps her life was like that, everything foreordained in a grand design, and she was like a foolish builder who wanted a waterfall in the chancel.”

“We’re all good when it suits us, he used to say: that doesn’t count. It’s when you want so badly to do something wrong—when you’re about to make a fortune from a dishonest deal, or kiss the lovely lips of your neighbor’s wife, or tell a lie to get yourself out of terrible trouble—that’s when you need the rules. Your integrity is like a sword, he would say: you shouldn’t wave it until you’re about to put it to the test.”

“A baby was like a revolution, Grigori thought: you could start one, but you could not control how it would turn out.”

“A waiter appeared, and Gus said: “Bring coffee for my guests, please, and a plate of ham sandwiches.” He deliberately did not ask them what they wanted. He had seen Woodrow Wilson act like this with people he wanted to intimidate.”

“And what if Britain lost? There would be a financial crisis, unemployment, and destitution. Working-class men would take up Ethel’s father’s cry and say that they had never been allowed to vote for the war. The people’s rage against their rulers would be boundless.”

“President Wilson says a leader must treat public opinion the way a sailor deals with the wind, using it to blow the ship in one direction or another, but never trying to go directly against it.”

“In every country, those who were against war had been overruled. The Austrians had attacked Serbia when they might have held back; the Russians had mobilized instead of negotiating; the Germans had refused to attend an international conference to settle the issue; the French had been offered the chance to remain neutral and had spurned it; and now the British were about to join in when they might easily have remained on the sidelines.”

“A German attack on Russia’s ally France would, in reality, be defensive—but the English talked as if Germany was trying to dominate Europe.”

“He was looking forward eagerly to seeing her again. He had coped perfectly well on his own, of course, but it was very reassuring to have someone in your life who was always ready to fight for you, and he had missed that comforting feeling,”

“Why did people manufacture trouble when there was already so much of it in the world?”

“If it be a sin to covet honour, I am the most offending soul alive.”

“An optimistic early-rising whore with red lips and red boots sauntered along, smiling hopefully at middle-aged men, but there were no takers at this hour.”

“Juré a mi padre, cuando se estaba muriendo, que cuidaría de Richard hasta que llegara a ser conde de Shiring - explicó.¡Pero puede ser que eso no ocurra nunca!Un juramento es un juramento.Es imposible que creas tal cosa -dijo él-. ¡Un juramento sólo son palabras! No es nada en comparación con esto. Esto es real, esto somos tú y yo.”

“Why do you have to be the same as the others? ...Most of them are stupid.”

“Weißt du denn nicht, dass du die Seele verlierst, wenn du die Wahrheit über dich selbst abstreitest?”

“Ethel said: "Lloyd, there's someone here you may remember-" Daisy could not restrain herself. She ran to Lloyd and threw herself into his arms. She hugged him. She looked into his green eyes, then kissed his brown cheeks and his broken nose and then his mouth. "I love you, Lloyd," she sad madly. "I love you, I love you, I love you.""I love you, too, Daisy," he said.Behind her, Daisy heard Ethel's wry voice. "You do remember, I see.”

“Even lords ought to follow the customs.”

“I could fall for you in a heartbeat”

“His talent was to express his readers’ most stupid and ignorant prejudices as if they made sense, so that the shameful seemed respectable. That was why they bought the paper.”

“Moderates always seem to deal in hopes rather than in facts.”

“He believed in Communism the way most people believed in God: he would not be greatly surprised or disappointed if he turned out to be wrong, and meanwhile it made little difference to the way he lived.”

“Such talk makes you think of radiation like water in a pool: if it’s four feet high you’re safe, if it’s eight feet high you drown. But in fact radiation levels are much more like speed limits on the highway – thirty miles per hour is safer than eighty, but not as safe as twenty, and the only way to be completely safe is not to get in the car.”

“Why was it, Lloyd wondered, that the people who wanted to destroy everything good about their country were the quickest to wave the national flag?”

“A wine cellar requires order, forethought and good taste,’ the old man used to say. ‘These are the virtues that made Britain great.”

“When you're thinking, please remember this: excessive pride is a familiar sin, but a man may just as easily frustrate the will of God through excessive humility.”

“Hunger is the best seasoning.”

“Mam kissed Ethel and said: “I'm glad to see you settled at last, anyway,” That word ANYWAY carried a lot of baggage, Ethel thought. It meant: “Congratulations, even though you're a fallen woman, and you've got an illegitmate child whose father no one knows, and you're marrying a Jew, and living in London, which is the same as Sodom and Gomorrah.” But Ethel accepted Mam's qualified blessing and vowed never to say such things to her own child.”

“Jack was too absorbed in his work to hear the bell. He was mesmerized by the challenge of making soft, round shapes of hard rock. The stone had a will of its own, and if he tried to make it do something it did not want to do, it would fight him, and his chisel would slip, or dig in too deeply, spoiling the shapes. But once he had got to know the lump of rock in front of him he could transform it. The more difficult the task, the more fascinated he was. He was beginning to feel that the decorative carving demanded by Tom was too easy. Zigzags, lozenges, dogtooth, spirals and plain roll moldings bored him, and even these leaves were rather stiff and repetitive. He wanted to curve natural-looking foliage, pliable and irregular, and copy the different shapes of real leaves, oak and ash and birch.”

“In both cases, weakness and scruples had defeated strength and ruthlessness.”

“She wanted to say 'I love you like a thunderstorm, like a lion, like a helpless rage'...”

“You never know," Jack said speculatively. "There may come a time when savages like William Hamleigh aren't in power; when the laws protect the ordinary people instead of enslaving them; when the king makes peace instead of war. Think of that - a time when towns in England don't need walls!”

“You can’t write novels about people who are timid, risk-averse and passive. Or you can, but they’re called literary novels.”

“The duck swallows the worm, the fox kills the duck, the men shoot the fox, and the devil hunts the men.”

“She looked at his young face, so full of concern and tenderness; and she remembered why she had run away from everyone else and sought solitude here. She yearned to kiss him, and she saw the answering longing in his eyes. Every fiber of her body told her to throw herself into his arms, but she knew what she had to do. She wanted to say, I love you like a thunderstorm, like a lion, like a helpless rage; but instead she said: "I think I'm going to marry Alfred.”

“What news? There's nothing to tell. I'm a nun.”

“Your integrity is like a sword, he would say: you shouldn't wave it until you're about to put it to the test.”

“Rommel could smell the sea. At Torbruk the heat and the dust and flies were as bad as they had been in the desert, but it was all made bearable by that occasional whiff of salty dampness in the faint breeze.”

“Fear could paralyse. Action was the antidote.”

“Un completo desconocido se me acercó y me dijo: Eres tu... !Cuanto tiempo! Tienes que casarte conmigo antes de que vuelvas a desaparecer. Creí que estaba loco.”

“Everybody takes what they life from the teachings of the church, and ignores the parts that don't suit them.”

“You see, all that I ever held dear has been taken from me," she said in a matter-of-fact tone. "And when you've lost everything-" Her facade began to crumble, and her voice broke, but she made herself carry on. "When you've lost everything, you've got nothing to lose.”

“She loved him because he had brought her back to life. She had been like a caterpillar in a cocoon, and he had drawn her out and shown her that she was a butterfly.”

“Having faith in God did not mean sitting back and doing nothing. It meant believing you would find success if you did your best honestly and energetically.”

“I imagined it. I wrote it. But I guess I never thought I'd see it.”