Ishmael 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

I 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

It pleased Alaina that they were all together: she and Jack and their children, and Jack's mother, and Alaina's brother, and Martha. It was quite like an ordinary family, and Alaina 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. Furthermore, it was no use pretending this was a normal family.

— Ken Follett

It was the study hour. Most of the monks were reading. A few were meditating, an activity that was suspiciously similar to dozing.

— Ken Follett

Jack 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, dog tooth, 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

Monks committed all the same sins that ordinary people did. He had just been shocked by the woman's shamelessness. The sight of her nakedness remained with him, the way the hot heart of a candle flame, stared at for a few moments, would burn on behind closed eyelids.

— Ken Follett

Most rich people have a gangster in their ancestry somewhere.

— Ken Follett

No one's an angel - especially if he's a man

— Ken Follett

One of the hardest things for me, now that I'm famous, is finding people who can read my stuff and give me an honest critique.

— Ken Follett

... people always credit prime ministers with more brains than they've got.

— Ken Follett