> I know what all the words mean, but I still have trouble parsing them into a sentence...

"The Governor paused and looked reflectively over at Bond. He said: "You're not married, but I think it's the same with all relationships between a man and a woman. They can survive anything so long as some kind of basic humanity exists between the two people. When all kindness has gone, when one person obviously and sincerely doesn't care if the other is alive or dead, then it's just no good. That particular insult to the ego--worse, to the instinct of self-preservation--can never be forgiven. I've noticed this in hundreds of marriages. I've seen flagrant infidelities patched up, I've seen crimes and even murder forgiven by the other party, let alone bankruptcy and every other form of social crime. Incurable disease, blindness, disaster--all these can be overcome. But never the death of common humanity in one of the partners. I've thought about this and I've invented a rather high-sounding title for this basic factor in human relations. I have called it the Law of the Quantum of Solace."

Daniel Craig explained it rather nicely.

"We could have gone for a snappier title, but that sort of suggests we're insecure about what we're trying to say. The statement is an Ian Fleming statement. It comes from the idea that in a relationship, if you don't have a quantum of solace left in your relationship, then give up. Where Bond is left at the end of the last movie his heart's been broken and he doesn't have that quantum of solace, he doesn't have that closure on what happened in his life and he needs to find out. What is great about it is it also applies to something very important in the plot."

It's a wonderful, poignant concept, the sort of thing that tends to get ignored by the popular image of 007. If any relationship has that quantum of solace left in it, it can survive: if it doesn't, it won't.