“Having 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 from The Pillars of the Earth
“The most expensive part of building is the mistakes.”
― Ken Follett, quote from The Pillars of the Earth
“She loved him because he had brought her back to life. She had been like a caterpillar in a cocoon, and he had drawn her out and shown her that she was a butterfly.”
― Ken Follett, quote from The Pillars of the Earth
“She wanted to say 'I love you like a thunderstorm, like a lion, like a helpless rage'...”
― Ken Follett, quote from The Pillars of the Earth
“Nevertheless, the book gave Jack a feeling he had never had before, that the past was like a story, in which one thing led to another, and the world was not a boundless mystery, but a finite thing that could be comprehended. ”
― Ken Follett, quote from The Pillars of the Earth
“The duck swallows the worm, the fox kills the duck, the men shoot the fox, and the devil hunts the men.”
― Ken Follett, quote from The Pillars of the Earth
“I imagined it. I wrote it. But I guess I never thought I'd see it.”
― Ken Follett, quote from The Pillars of the Earth
“You never know," Jack said speculatively. "There may come a time when savages like William Hamleigh aren't in power; when the laws protect the ordinary people instead of enslaving them; when the king makes peace instead of war. Think of that - a time when towns in England don't need walls!”
― Ken Follett, quote from The Pillars of the Earth
“Proportion is the heart of beauty.”
― Ken Follett, quote from The Pillars of the Earth
“When things are simple, fewer mistakes are made. The most expensive part of a building is the mistakes.”
― Ken Follett, quote from The Pillars of the Earth
“But the lesson of Abraham's story is that God demands the best we have to offer, that which is most precious to us.”
― Ken Follett, quote from The Pillars of the Earth
“She was unique: there was something abnormal about her, and it was that abnormal something that made her magnetic.”
― Ken Follett, quote from The Pillars of the Earth
“To someone standing in the nave, looking down the length of the church toward the east, the round window would seem like a huge sun exploding into innumerable shards of gorgeous color.”
― Ken Follett, quote from The Pillars of the Earth
“She looked at his young face, so full of concern and tenderness; and she remembered why she had run away from everyone else and sought solitude here. She yearned to kiss him, and she saw the answering longing in his eyes. Every fiber of her body told her to throw herself into his arms, but she knew what she had to do. She wanted to say, I love you like a thunderstorm, like a lion, like a helpless rage; but instead she said: "I think I'm going to marry Alfred.”
― Ken Follett, quote from The Pillars of the Earth
“Knotty theological questions are the least worrying of problems to me. Why? Because they will be resolved in the hereafter, and meanwhile they can be safely shelved.”
― Ken Follett, quote from The Pillars of the Earth
“When you're thinking, please remember this: excessive pride is a familiar sin, but a man may just as easily frustrate the will of God through excessive humility.”
― Ken Follett, quote from The Pillars of the Earth
“Don't look so sad," she said. Her eyes were full of tears.
"I can't help it," he said. "I am sad."
"I'm sorry I've made you so unhappy."
"Don't be sorry for that. Be sorry that you made me so happy. That's what hurts, woman. That you made me so happy.”
― Ken Follett, quote from The Pillars of the Earth
“Hard work should be rewarded by good food.”
― Ken Follett, quote from The Pillars of the Earth
“There was a long moment of silence. Philip was holding his breath. When Remigius looked up again, his face was wet with tears. "Yes , please, Father," he said. "I want to come home."
Philip felt a glow of joy. "Come on, then," he said. "Get on my horse."
Remigius looked flabbergasted.
Jonathan said: "Father! What are you doing?"
Philip said to Remigius: "Go on, do as I say."
Jonathan was horified, "but Ftaher, how will you travel?"
"I'll walk," Philip said happily. "One of us must."
"Let Remigius walk!" Jonathan said in a tone of outrage.
"Let him ride," Philip said, "He's pleased God today."
"What about you? Haven't you pleased God more than Remigius?"
"Jesus said there's more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous people," Philip countered. "Don't you remember the parable of the prodigal son? When he came home, his father killed the fatted calf. The angels are rejoicing over Remigius's tears. The least I can do is give him my horse.”
― Ken Follett, quote from The Pillars of the Earth
“It was an odd thing to do, to stand in a street in the hope of seeing someone who hardly knew him, but he did not want to move.”
― Ken Follett, quote from The Pillars of the Earth
“What you’re doing is wrong,” he said. “I mean evil. To give up happiness like this is like throwing jewels into the ocean. It’s far worse than any sin.”
― Ken Follett, quote from The Pillars of the Earth
“It's like knowing your way through the forest. You don't keep the whole forest in your mind, but wherever you are, you know where to go next.”
― Ken Follett, quote from The Pillars of the Earth
“He had been granted his life's wish-but conditionally.”
― Ken Follett, quote from The Pillars of the Earth
“I’ve worked with volunteers before,” he began. “It’s important not to… not to treat them like servants. We may feel that they are laboring to obtain a heavenly reward, and should therefore work harder than they would for money; but they don’t necessarily take that attitude. They feel they’re working for nothing, and doing a great kindness to us thereby; and if we seem ungrateful they will work slowly and make mistakes. It will be best to rule them with a light touch.”
― Ken Follett, quote from The Pillars of the Earth
“In both cases, weakness and scruples had defeated strength and ruthlessness.”
― Ken Follett, quote from The Pillars of the Earth
“He had seen - clever, clever boy that he was - that she could not be won by wooing; and he had approached her sidelong, as a friend rather than a lover, meeting her in the woods and telling her stories and making her love him without her noticing.”
― Ken Follett, quote from The Pillars of the Earth
“He was the worst kind of Christian, Philip realized: he embraced all of the negatives, enforced every proscription, insisted on all forms of denial, and demanded strict punishment for every offence; yet he ignored all the compassion of Christianity, denied its mercy, flagrantly disobeyed its ethic of love, and openly flouted the gentle laws of Jesus.”
― Ken Follett, quote from The Pillars of the Earth
Ken Follett
Born place: in Cardiff, The United Kingdom
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“Finally the pieces started to make sense and I began to feel a pensive awareness of circumstances other than my own; a knowing that brings with it a kind is stillness that I didn't quite understand but accepted it for its own.”
― Christopher Scotton, quote from The Secret Wisdom of the Earth
“I can not remember telling my parents that I was studying classics, they might well have found out for the first time on graduation day. Of all the subjects on this planet, I think they would have been hard-put to name one less useful in Greek mythology when it came to securing the keys of an executive bathroom. Now I would like to make it clear in parenthesis, that I do not blame my parents for their point of view. There is an expiry date for blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction. The moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you. What is more, I can not criticize my parents for hoping that I would never experience poverty. They had been poor themselves, and I have since been poor. And I quite agree with them, that it is not an ennobling experience. Poverty, entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression, It means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is something by which to pride yourself, but poverty itself, is romanticized only by fools. But I feared at your age was not poverty, but failure... Now, I am not dull enough to suppose that because you are young, gifted, and well educated, that you have never known heartbreak, hardship, or heartache. Talent and intelligence, never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the fates... ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure.”
― J.K. Rowling, quote from Very Good Lives: The Fringe Benefits of Failure and the Importance of Imagination
“This”—she patted the arm of the supermodel behind her—“is my fiancé, Cole.” “Nice to meet you.” He held out his hand and I noted the leather bracelets and aviator watch he was wearing, along with the chunky silver ring on his middle finger. He was that guy. Cool, tattooed, can-pull-off-man-jewelry guy. I tried not to blush and failed as I shook his hand.”
― Samantha Young, quote from Moonlight on Nightingale Way
“Little world, full of scars and gashes, ripened with another's pain,
Your flowers feed on carrion--so do your birds;
Men feed on each other because you taught them life was cheap,
Flowing from your endless womb without pain or understanding.
No midwife caresses your flesh or bathes clean your progeny,
Life spurts from you, little world,
and you regard it with disdain.
Only bruised men sense your cruelty,
men whose life has lost its meaning.”
― James Kavanaugh, quote from There Are Men Too Gentle to Live Among Wolves
“Most people have difficulty thinking of themselves as just another animal. They refuse to face the fact that 96% of what can be found in their bodies can also be found inside a pig or a horse or that our DNA is 97. 5% identical to that of a gorilla and 98. 4% to that of a chimpanzee. The only thing that makes us different from other animals is our ability to think and make forward plans.”
― Allan Pease, quote from Why Men Don't Listen and Women Can't Read Maps: How We're Different and What to Do About It
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Fall of NightBookQuoters 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.
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