The De Bernières were very military. I broke the military tradition but I was terribly proud of my father being a soldier.

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.

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.

Love is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake and then subsides.

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

How strange that the world should change because of words, and words change because of the world

The trouble with fulfilling your ambitions is you think you will be transformed into some sort of archangel and you're not. You still have to wash your socks.