Quotes from Rosemary Sutcliff

It is very hot tonight," Justin said, and loosed the folds of his light cloak, revealing the sprig of rye-grass thrust through the bronze clasp at the neck of his tunic.

A soft gust of wind swooped at them under the hornbeam branches, setting the shadows flurrying, and when it died into the grass, Randal laid Bevis' body down, with a stunned emptiness inside him as though something of himself had gone too.

As no man is beyond God's mercy, so none can be beyond mine[.]

If we break faith with thee, may the green earth gape and swallow us, may the grey seas break in and overwhelm us, may the sky of stars fall and crush us out of life for ever.

He loved me and didn't want me hurt. What was worse, he didn't even understand that I had the right to be hurt.

Always, everywhere, the Wolves gather on the frontiers, waiting. It needs only that a man should lower his eye for a moment, and they will be in to strip the bones. Rome is failing, my children.

The Commander was a complete contrast to his men: Roman to his arrogant finger-tips, wiry and dark as they were raw-boned and fair. The olive-skinned face under the curve of his crested helmet had not a soft line in it anywhere - a harsh face it would have been, but that it was winged with laughter lines, and between his level black brows showed a small raised scar that marked him for one who had passed the Raven Degree of Mithras.

And out of Tristan's heart there grew a hazel tree, and out of Iseult's a honeysuckle, and they arched together and clung and intertwined so that they could never be separated anymore.

It was a small bothy, one step brought us to meet in the midst of it; my arms were around him, and his around me, the strong right arm and the maimed left that felt sapless and brittle as a bit of dead stick, and we held fast together, and wept somewhat, each into the hollow of the other's shoulder. Maybe it is easier to weep when one grows old, than it was in the flower of life.

It was a story that still hurt in the telling, which perhaps made it a worthwhile gift, after all.

Watching the Commander's hands on the bandage, it seemed to Beric more than ever strange and wonderful that Justinius should do this for him, a galley slave; should do it as though he cared. That was the most wonderful thing; not that Justinius should dress his wrist, but that he should do it as though he cared.

That is thy home burning. That is the Normans' work, and never thee forget it!

And here in Britain the wind moaned through the desolate woods, the skies wept, and wet gale-blown leaves pattered against the windows and stuck there, making little pathetic shadows against the steamy glass. There had been wild weather often enough in his own country, but that had been the wild weather of home; here was the wind and and rain and wet leaves of exile.

For one splinter of time their eyes met in something that was almost a salute, a parting salute between two who might have been friends.

As we grow older, we forget how near to the ground we once were. I do not mean merely because our heads were lower down than they are now, though of course that comes into it; but near in the sense of kinship. A small child is aware of the sights and smells and textures of the ground with an acute awareness that we lose in growing up.

Do not be doing that for me," Osca said, "for if it were you lying there, and I standing over you, do you think it's one tear I'd be weeping for you?" "I know well enough that you would not, for Dearmid O'Dyna stands between us even now," said Finn, "But as for me, I will weep for whom I choose to weep for!

we held fast together, and wept somewhat, each into the hollow of the other's shoulder. Maybe it is easier to weep when one grows old, than it was in the flower of life. The strength ebbs, or the wisdom grows ...

You could give a slave his freedom, but nothing could undo the fact that he had been a slave; and between him, a freed-man, and any free man who had never been unfree, there would still be a difference. Wherever the Roman way of life held good, there would still be a difference.

Rain it did, and that night in the atrium of the old farmhouse, they could here it hushing and pattering on the roof and among the broad leaves of the fig-tree outside; and the little breath of air from the open door that scarcely stirred the flame of the lamp on the table bore with it that most wonderful of all smells, the throat-catching heart-catching scent of rain on a hot and thirsty earth.

That rose-bush gave Marcus a sense of continuance; it was a link between him and those who had been here before him, here on the frontier, and the others who would come after.

Here in Isca Dumnoniorum, Rome was a new slip grafted onto an old stock - and the graft had not yet taken.

They were sweeping at full gallop round the mile-wide curve of the woodshore. To Marcus that moment was always like being born from one kind of life into another.

would there not be another hunger on him all his life? For other scents and sights and sounds; pale and changeful northern skies and the green plover calling?

He could go back to all that now, to the hills and the people among whom he had been bred, and for whom he had been so bitterly homesick, here in the North. But if he did, would there not be another hunger on him all his life? For other scents and sights and sounds; pale and changeful northern skies and the green plover calling?