01UndatedHaving 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.Ken Follett / quote ↗
02UndatedI think there are two kinds of marriage," Ethel said thoughtfully. "One is a comfortable partnership, where two people share the same hopes and fears, raise children as a team, and give each other comfort and help." She was talking about herself and Bernie, Daisy realized. "The other is a wild passion, madness and joy and sex, possibly with someone completely unsuitable, maybe someone you don't admire or don't even really like." She was thinking about her affair with Fitz, Daisy felt sure. She held her breath: she knew Ethel was now telling her the raw truth. "I've been lucky. I've had both," Ethel said. "And here's my advice to you. If you get the chance of the mad kind of love, grab it with both hands, and to hell with the consequences.Ken Follett / quote ↗
04UndatedHe was nineteen years old, homeless and rootless, with no family and no purpose in life.Ken Follett / quote ↗
05Undated... people always credit prime ministers with more brains than they've got.Ken Follett / quote ↗
07UndatedJack 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.Ken Follett / quote ↗
11UndatedAliena's brother, Richard, sometimes reminded her of her father, with a look or a gesture, and that was when she felt a surge of affection.Ken Follett / quote ↗
12UndatedIt pleased Aliena that they were all together: she and Jack and their children, and Jack's mother, and Aliena's brother, and Martha. It was quite like an ordinary family, and Aliena could almost forget that her father had died in a dungeon, and she was legally married to Jack's stepbrother, and Ellen was an outlaw, and—She shook her head. It was no use pretending this was a normal family.Ken Follett / quote ↗
13UndatedIf we're all aggressive, obedient solders [sic], who's going to write the poems and play the blues and go on anti-war protest marches?Ken Follett / quote ↗
14UndatedThey did not suspect her for a moment. It did not occur to them that a woman could be dangerous. How foolish they were. Women could do most of the things men did. Who was left in charge when the men were fighting wars, or going on crusades? There were women carpenters, dyers, tanners, bakers and brewers.Ken Follett / quote ↗
15UndatedThis was her destiny, and it was a fit and proper one. She was not unwilling, but she knew this was a fateful moment, and she had a sense of doors closing behind her and the path of her life being fixed irrevocably.Ken Follett / quote ↗
16UndatedShe shook her head in perplexity. "I'll never know where you got the idea that you were destined for greatness." She dropped the rest of the rabbit in the pot and begun to clean the underside of its skin. She would use the fur. "You certainly didn't inherit it from your forebears.Ken Follett / quote ↗
17UndatedIshmael was looking at him through narrowed eyes. “This is very important to you, this box.”“It’s important to the world.”Ishmael said: “The sun rises, and the sun sets. Sometimes it rains. We live, then we die.” He shrugged.He would never understand, Wolff thought; but others would.Ken Follett / quote ↗
18UndatedIt was the study hour. Most of the monks were reading. A few were meditating, an activity that was suspiciously similar to dozing.Ken Follett / quote ↗
19UndatedBeing a monk was the strangest and most perverted way of life imaginable. Monks spent half their lives putting themselves through pain and discomfort that they could easily avoid, and the other half muttering meaningless mumbo jumbo in empty churches at all hours of the day and night. They deliberately shunned anything good—girls, sports, feasting and family life.Ken Follett / quote ↗
20UndatedEverything 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.Ken Follett / quote ↗
22UndatedA chill December morning dawned, with rags and tatters of mist hanging on the trees like poor people’s washing.Ken Follett / quote ↗
23UndatedI don't think it really matters whether parents are strict or lenient, as long as they're consistent. Kids can live with more or less any set of rules so long as they know what they are. It's arbitrary tyranny that gets them mixed up.Ken Follett / quote ↗
24UndatedIn the dynamics of the main family of the story, a rising socialist in England's postwar government expects his grandparents to be pleased that the local aristocrat's garden is commandeered to allow the people to get coal underneath. Instead, the grandparents grieve because the garden represents something more than a resource to be divided. It is a symbol of community and beauty.Ken Follett / quote ↗
