Captain Corelli's Mandolin filmscript Quotes

“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, it is not the desire to mate every second minute of the day, it is not lying awake at night imagining that he is kissing every cranny of your body. No, don't blush, I am telling you some truths. That is just being "in love", which any fool can do. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident.”
― Shawn Slovo, Captain Corelli's Mandolin filmscript

“And science is about facts, and morality is about values. They are not the same thing and they don't grow together. No one can find a value on the slide of a microscope.”
― Louis de Bernières, Captain Corelli's Mandolin filmscript

“Love itself is what is left over when one being in love is burned away, and this is both an art and option that accident. Your mother and I had it, we had roots that group of each other on the ground and when all the pretty blossoms branches. We found that we were one tree and not two.”
― Louis de Bernières, Captain Corelli's Mandolin filmscript

“I am not a cynic, but I do know that history is the propaganda of the victors.”
― Louis de Bernières, Captain Corelli's Mandolin filmscript

“Even gold is worth less than bread”
― Louis de Bernières, Captain Corelli's Mandolin filmscript

“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. But sometimes the petals fall away and the roots have not entwined.”
― Louis de Bernières, Captain Corelli's Mandolin filmscript

“Promise me one thing."
He nodded and she continued, "Whenever you are about to do something terrible, think of me, and then don't do it.”
― Louis de Bernières, Captain Corelli's Mandolin filmscript

“All my home is nothing but sadness and silence and ruin and memory. I have been reduced, I am my own ghost, all my beauty and youth have shrivelled away, there are no illusions of happiness to impel me. Life is a prison of poverty and aborted dreams, it is nothing but a slow progress to my place beneath the soil, it is a plot by God to disenchant us with the flesh, it is nothing but a brief flame in a bowl of oil between one darkness and another one that ends it.
I sit here and remember former times. I remember music in the night, and I know that all my joys have been pulled out of my mouth like teeth. I shall be hungry and thirsty and longing forever. If only I had a child, a child to suckle at the breast, if I had Antonio. I have been eaten up like bread. I lie down in thorns and my well is filled with stones. All my happiness was smoke.”
― Louis de Bernières, Captain Corelli's Mandolin filmscript

“Madonna Maria, Dottore, please tell me some lies."
"I am not Pinocchio. The truth will make us free. We overcome by looking it in the eyes.”
― Louis de Bernières, Captain Corelli's Mandolin filmscript

“… she realised suddenly that there was something about music that had never been revealed to her before: it was not merely the production of sweet sound; it was, to those who understood it, an emotional and intellectual odyssey.”
― Louis de Bernieres, Captain Corelli's Mandolin filmscript

“Socrates stared abjectly at his right foot, which it had become too much of an ordeal to move. He summoned up an effort of will which, to his consternation, moved one of his forefingers. He tried to make the effort of will to stop it, but could not make the effort of will to make the effort of will. Locked into an infinite regress of incapacity, he stood absolutely still and retreated into the kaleidoscope of unconnected images behind his eyes. One of the nuns wiped a tear from his face”
― Louis de Bernières, Captain Corelli's Mandolin filmscript

“It was now possible to wake up in the morning and be amazed and grateful to be yet alive and living in a solid house, and to go to bed at night full of relief at having lived a commonplace and uneventful day.”
― Louis de Berniéres, Captain Corelli's Mandolin filmscript

“L'amore è una pazzia temporanea, erutta come un vulcano e poi si placa. E quando accade, bisogna prendere una decisione. Devi capire se le vostre radici si sono intrecciate a tal punto da rendere inconcepibile una separazione. Perché questo è l'amore. Non è l'ardore, l'eccitazione, le imperiture promesse di eterna passione, il desiderio di accoppiarsi in ogni minuto del giorno. Non è restare sveglia la notte a immaginare che lui baci ogni angoletto del tuo corpo. Questo è semplicemente essere 'innamorati', una cosa che sa fare qualunque sciocco. L'amore è ciò che resta quando l'innamoramento si è bruciato; ed è sia un'arte, sia un caso fortunato." pag. 288”
― Louis de Bernières, Captain Corelli's Mandolin filmscript

“The self-anointed superior races, drunk on Darwin and nationalist hyperbole, besotted with eugenics and beguiled by myth, were winding up machines of genocide that soon would be unleashed upon a world already weary to the heart of such infinite foolery and contemptible vainglory.”
― Louis de Bernières, Captain Corelli's Mandolin filmscript

“The silver fish flashed in the sun like new knives, transforming their asphyxiation into a display of beauty as they flicked and leapt against each other and died.”
― Louis de Bernières, Captain Corelli's Mandolin filmscript

“I have a father and mother, four sisters, and three brothers, but I have not had a family since puberty. I had to live among them secretly, like one who conceals leprosy. It was not their fault that I was made into a thespian. I had to dance with girls at festal, I had to flirt with girls in the playground of the school and when taking the evening passeggiata in the piazza. I had to answer my grandmother when she asked me what kind of girl would I like to marry and whether I wanted sons or daughters. I had to listen with delight to my friends describing the intricacies of the female pudenda, I had to learn to relate fabulous histories of what I had done with girls. I learned to be more lonely than it ought to be possible to feel.”
― Louis de Bernières, Captain Corelli's Mandolin filmscript

“Nonetheless, I love you."
"Forever?"
"In Sicily they say that eternal love lasts for two years. Fortunately, I am not Sicilian."
"Greek men love themselves and their mothers forever. Their wives they love for six months. Fortunately I am a woman.”
― Louis de Bernières, Captain Corelli's Mandolin filmscript

“It was a question above all of personal and national honour, because the important thing was that Greece should come through this trial without the slightest imputation of turpitude. When soldiers are dead, when a country is devastated and destroyed, it is honour that survives and endures. It is honour that breathes life into the corpse when evil times have passed.”
― Louis de Bernières, Captain Corelli's Mandolin filmscript

“It is said that in ancient times all lands where one, and it seems that the continents themselves profess nostalgia for that state of affairs, just as there are people who say that they belong not to their nation but to the world, demanding an international passport and universal right of residence. Thus India pushes northwards, ploughing up the Himalayas, determined not to be an island but to press its tropical and humid lust on Asia. The Arabian peninsula wrecks a sly revenge on the Ottomans by leaning against Turkey casually in the hope of causing it to fall into the Black Sea. Africa, tired of white folk who think of it as musky, perilous, unknowable and romantic, squeezes northward in the determination that Europe shall look it in the face for once, and admit after all that its civilization was conceived in Egypt. Only the Americans hurry away westwards, so determined to be isolated and superior that they have forgotten that the world is round and that one day perforce they will find themselves glued prodigiously to China.”
― Louis de Bernières, Captain Corelli's Mandolin filmscript

“I should have brought her up stupid, " said the doctor at last. "When women acquire powers of deduction there's no knowing where trouble can end.”
― Louis de Bernières, Captain Corelli's Mandolin filmscript

“Once, near the Metsovon pass, in December, when it was twenty degrees below zero because there was no cloud, the Italians sent up a starshell. It exploded in a cascade of brilliant blue light against the face of the full moon, and the sparks drifted to earth in slow motion like the souls of reluctant angels. As that small magnesium sun hovered and blazed, the black pines stepped out of their modest shadows as though previously they had been veiled like virgins but had now decided to be seen as they are in heaven. The drifts of snow pulsed with the incandescence of the absolute chastity of ice, a mortar coughed disconsolately, and an owl whooped. For the first time in my life I shivered physically from something other than the cold; the world had sloughed away its skin and revealed itself as energy and light.”
― Louis de Bernières, Captain Corelli's Mandolin filmscript

“She tried to control herself rigidly, saying to herself, "I won't look at him for another half hour." But all to no avail. She would sneak a glimpse, his eyes would flicker, and there she would be again, imprisoned by an amused smile and a raised eyebrow.”
― Louis de Bernières, Captain Corelli's Mandolin filmscript

“All of my joys have been pulled out of my mouth like teeth. All my home is nothing but sadness and silence and ruin and memory. I have been reduced, I am my own ghost, all my own beauty and youth have shrilled away, there are no illusions of happiness to impel me. Life is a prison of poverty and aborted dreams, it is nothing but a slow progress to my place beneath the soil.”
― Louis de Bernières, Captain Corelli's Mandolin filmscript

“Didn't the secret police know the exact aroma and chemical composition of every subversive fart in Greece?”
― Louis de Bernières, Captain Corelli's Mandolin filmscript

“He did not ask me to shoot him; perhaps at the very end he loved his vanishing life.”
― Louis de Bernières, Captain Corelli's Mandolin filmscript