Quotes from Fall of Giants

“A baby was like a revolution, Grigori thought: you could start one, but you could not control how it would turn out.”
― Ken Follett, quote from Fall of Giants

“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.”
― Ken Follett, quote from Fall of Giants

“I think more people should shoot newspaper editors...it might improve the press”
― Ken Follett, quote from Fall of Giants

“You never get cheered for telling people the situation is not as simple as they think.”
― Ken Follett, quote from Fall of Giants

“I could fall for you in a heartbeat”
― Ken Follett, quote from Fall of Giants

“The ability to listen to smart people who disagree with you is a rare talent”
― Ken Follett, quote from Fall of Giants

“Moderates always seem to deal in hopes rather than in facts.”
― Ken Follett, quote from Fall of Giants

“There’s a saying: ‘If you owe a hundred dollars, the bank has you in its power; but if you owe a million dollars, you have the bank in your power.”
― Ken Follett, quote from Fall of Giants

“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.”
― Ken Follett, quote from Fall of Giants

“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.”
― Ken Follett, quote from Fall of Giants

“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.”
― Ken Follett, quote from Fall of Giants

“Marvelous, isn’t it, how these Germans can shoot back at us even when they’re fucking dead.”
― Ken Follett, quote from Fall of Giants

“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.”
― Ken Follett, quote from Fall of Giants

“I went to the doctor," said the woman next to Ethel. "I said to him, 'I've got an itchy twat.'"

[...]
She went on: "The doctor says to me, he goes, 'You shouldn't say that, it's a rude word.'"

[...]

"I says to him, 'What should I say, then, doctor?' He says to me, 'Say you've got an itchy finger.'"

[...]

"He says to me, 'Do your finger itch you all the time, Mrs. Perkins, or just now and again?'"

Mildred paused, and the women were silent, waiting for the punch line.

"I says, 'No, doctor, only when I piss through it.”
― Ken Follett, quote from Fall of Giants

“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.”
― Ken Follett, quote from Fall of Giants

“If it be a sin to covet honour, I am the most offending soul alive.”
― Ken Follett, quote from Fall of Giants

“—Que Dios nos libre de los hombres con un destino dictado por la voluntad divina”
― Ken Follett, quote from Fall of Giants

“But her angry feminism had set as hard as concrete during years of living alongside the tough, hardworking, dirt-poor women of London’s East End. Men often told a fairy tale in which there was a division of labor in families, the man going out to earn money, the woman looking after home and children. Reality was different. Most of the women Ethel knew worked twelve hours a day and looked after home and children as well. Underfed, overworked, living in hovels, and dressed in rags, they could still sing songs and laugh and love their children. In Ethel’s view one of those women had more right to vote than any ten men.”
― Ken Follett, quote from Fall of Giants

“You're the one who doesn't understand," Lev said. "In America, I have my own car. There's more food than you can eat, all the booze I want, all the cigarettes I can smoke. I have five suits!"

"What's the point in having five suits?" Grigori said in frustration. "It's like having five beds. You can only use one at a time!”
― Ken Follett, quote from Fall of Giants

“It was unladylike even to know the name of your lawyer, let alone to understand your rights under the law. No wonder women were mercilessly exploited.”
― Ken Follett, quote from Fall of Giants

“Lenin’s idea of relaxation was to sit down with a foreign-language dictionary for an hour or two.”
― Ken Follett, quote from Fall of Giants

“A wine cellar requires order, forethought and good taste,’ the old man used to say. ‘These are the virtues that made Britain great.”
― Ken Follett, quote from Fall of Giants

“Monika answered for her father. Giving Walter a conspiratorial grin, she said: “Daddy used to say that if the tsar had been born to a different station in life, he might, with an effort, have become a competent postman.”
― Ken Follett, quote from Fall of Giants

“Men were the only animals that slaughtered their own kind by the million, and turned the landscape into a waste of shell craters and barbed wire. Perhaps the human race would wipe itself out completely, and leave the world to the birds and trees, Walter thought apocalyptically. Perhaps that would be for the best.”
― Ken Follett, quote from Fall of Giants

“Era un día soleado de principios de verano, y se oía el canto de los pájaros. En un huerto cercano que hasta entonces se había librado de los bombardeos, los manzanos florecían de forma espectacular. El hombre era el único animal que acababa con la vida de los de su propia especie por millones y que convertía el paisaje en un terreno yermo, plagado de cráteres provocados por las bombas y alambradas de espino. Walter tuvo el pensamiento apocalíptico de que, tal vez, la humanidad se borraría a sí misma de la faz de la tierra y dejaría el mundo a los pájaros y a los árboles. Tal vez eso fuera lo mejor.”
― Ken Follett, quote from Fall of Giants

“In the struggle for female equality, Maud reflected, sometimes you had to fight women as well as men.”
― Ken Follett, quote from Fall of Giants

“It was a sunny day in early summer, and he could hear birdsong. In a nearby orchard that had so far escaped shelling, apple trees were blossoming bravely. Men were the only animals that slaughtered their own kind by the million, and turned the landscape into a waste of shell craters and barbed wire. Perhaps the human race would wipe itself out completely, and leave the world to the birds and trees, Walter thought apocalyptically. Perhaps that would be for the best.”
― Ken Follett, quote from Fall of Giants

“The world was changing so fast it was hard to keep up. Grigori had never been inside”
― Ken Follett, quote from Fall of Giants

“If you want to change the world, then foreign relations is the field in which you can do the most good—or evil.”
― Ken Follett, quote from Fall of Giants

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Popular quotes

“The philosopher Didactylos has summed up an alternative hypothesis as "Things just happen. What the hell".”
― Terry Pratchett, quote from Hogfather

“This much I'm certain of: it doesn't happen immediately. You'll finish [the book] and that will be that, until a moment will come, maybe in a month, maybe a year, maybe even several years. You'll be sick or feeling troubled or deeply in love or quietly uncertain or even content for the first time in your life. It won't matter. Out of the blue, beyond any cause you can trace, you'll suddenly realize things are not how you perceived them to be at all. For some reason, you will no longer be the person you believed you once were. You'll detect slow and subtle shifts going on all around you, more importantly shifts in you. Worse, you'll realize it's always been shifting, like a shimmer of sorts, a vast shimmer, only dark like a room. But you won't understand why or how. You'll have forgotten what granted you this awareness in the first place

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You might try then, as I did, to find a sky so full of stars it will blind you again. Only no sky can blind you now. Even with all that iridescent magic up there, your eye will no longer linger on the light, it will no longer trace constellations. You'll care only about the darkness and you'll watch it for hours, for days, maybe even for years, trying in vain to believe you're some kind of indispensable, universe-appointed sentinel, as if just by looking you could actually keep it all at bay. It will get so bad you'll be afraid to look away, you'll be afraid to sleep.

Then no matter where you are, in a crowded restaurant or on some desolate street or even in the comforts of your own home, you'll watch yourself dismantle every assurance you ever lived by. You'll stand aside as a great complexity intrudes, tearing apart, piece by piece, all of your carefully conceived denials, whether deliberate or unconscious. And then for better or worse you'll turn, unable to resist, though try to resist you still will, fighting with everything you've got not to face the thing you most dread, what is now, what will be, what has always come before, the creature you truly are, the creature we all are, buried in the nameless black of a name.

And then the nightmares will begin.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, quote from House of Leaves

“los hombres no son sólo meros compradores de los productos en serie producidos por los grandes trusts, sino que parecen incluso producidos por la omnipotencia de éstos, perdiendo su propia individuación.”
― Aldous Huxley, quote from Brave New World / Brave New World Revisited

“Good luck, good will, good fortune, not ill.”
― Stephen King, quote from Hearts in Atlantis

“Não era um grito de fome que rolava com o vento de março através destes campos nus? As rajadas do vento haviam aumentado e pareciam trazer consigo a morte do trabalho, uma escassez que mataria muitos homens. E, com os olhos errando de um ponto a outro, ele se esforçava por furar as sombras, atormentado pelo desejo e pelo medo de ver.”
― Émile Zola, quote from Germinal

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BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

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