So Much Life Left Over Quotes

“Eventually he began to consider that the ordering of his recollections was in fact not the most important thing; what was important was the final memory, the one he deliberately kept 'til last, the one that would be nearest to salvation, the one that blazed with light.”
― Louis de Bernières, So Much Life Left Over

“... the more languages you know, the better you understand your own. He realised that languages divide the world up differently from each other. He was half French, and had often wondered why it was that his French personality was different from his British one. In French he was more emphatic and rhetorical. Somebody had told him once that in Russian there was no word for blue. There was bound to be a word for pushrod, or tappet, though.”
― Louis de Bernières, So Much Life Left Over

“It's true,' said Rosie. 'No one is ever only one thing. Inside one person there are so many different people, and quite often they're at war with each other, and sometimes one of them is winning, and sometimes another. We're all so hard to understand, aren't we? I don't even understand myself. It'd be so much easier to be a dog, don't you think? Or one of these donkeys? I just wish so much...”
― Louis de Bernières, So Much Life Left Over

“If you have been embroiled in a war in which you confidently expected to die, what were you supposed to do with so much life unexpectedly left over? There were so many ways of passing the peace, and you would never know what they would have been like, those roads not taken.”
― Louis de Bernières, So Much Life Left Over

“No one is every only one thing. Inside one person there are so many different people, and quite often they're at war with each other, and sometimes one of them is winning, and sometimes another. We're all so hard to understand, aren't we? I don't even understand myself.”
― Louis de Bernières, So Much Life Left Over

“Machinery was so much easier to deal with than people. There was always a precise set of reasons why a machine may not be working, and there were always completely logical solutions. People were slippery and elusive, changeable and moody. You thought you understood them and then found out that you did not. You thought they loved you, and then they suddenly turned spiteful or indifferent.”
― Louis de Bernières, So Much Life Left Over