Quotes from Rosemary Sutcliff

My most dear, we have fought many fights together, and this is the last of them and it must be the best. If it is given to men to remember in the life we go to, remember that I loved you, and do not forget that you loved me.

Above all, I soaked in the 'feel' of the downs, the warm sense of the ground itself actively holding one up; a sureness, a steadfastness; and the sense that one gets in down country of kinship with a land that has been mixed up with the life men since it and men began.

He must have been one of those very special people, beloved of the gods, for whom time is elastic and can always be stretched out to play with a child.

The shining light of Logres shone as high and clear as ever, but as a candle flares before it gutters out.

The other thing I remember about the earlier and more active stages of my illness is having a black panther under my bed. After a while it was discovered that I was simply hallucinating as the result of too much arsenic in the medicine I was being given; but at the time it must have been even more terrifying for my parents than it was for me.

So Randal, who had never thought to be a knight, had his knighthood after all; and would have given all the world to be only Bevis's squire again.

She was wonderful; no mother could have been more wonderful. But ever after, she demanded that I should not forget it, nor cease to be grateful, nor hold an opinion different from her own, nor even, as I grew older, feel the need for any companionship but hers.

Sometime about the year 117, the IXth Legion, which was stationed at Eburacum where York now stands, marched north to deal with a rising among the Caledonian tribes and was never heard of again... no-one knows what happened to the IXth Legion after it marched into the northern mists.

Uncle Acton spent the whole of his working life in India, for the simple reason that he gave up work very young.

My mother was the perfect Spartan mother. I have always been able to imagine her telling her sons to return from battle 'with their shields, or on them'. She did actually try it on my father at the start of the Second World War. He didn't take it kindly, and confided to me ruefully that he thought she rather fancied herself a Hero's Widow.

I know someone who has never been able to read _The Cuckoo Clock_ since leaving her girlhood home, because it had to be read sitting halfway up the stairs, where the light through a stained-glass landing window fell on it, staining the pages red and blue and green.

He had a sudden longing, which wasn't a bit like him now, though it was like the person he had been before the Saxons burned his home, to give Ness things, to bring them and heap them into her lap. New songs and the three stars of Orion's belt, and honey-in-the-comb, and branches of white flowering thorn at mid-winter . . .

There was Sheila Walker who was six, and who, I am ashamed to say, Jean and I used to terrorize. She did ask for it - she grizzled and told tales - but still, we should not have fed her on dandelion leaves and then told her they were deadly poison. I see that now. At the time, it seemed like a good idea.

Does one refuse to ride with an Emperor?' 'If one is wise, one does not.

And Arthur, beginning to remember and trying not to, and suddenly more afraid than ever he had been in his life before, cried out "Father-Kay- why do you kneel to me? Get up! Oh sir, get up! I cannot bear that you should kneel to me, you who have been my father all these years." And when Sir Ector would not, he dropped on to his knees also, to be on a level with the old man again.

What will they be like, the people we come back to? What will it all be like?" he whispered suddenly in anguish.

And the joy flashed in Lancelot's ugly face like a bright blade drawn from a battered sheath.

You will be one of the menders of this world; not the makers, nor yet the breakers, just one of the menders.

I do not think that you can be changing the end of a song or a story like that, as though it were quite separate from the rest. I think the end of a story is part of it from the beginning.

It may be that the night will close over us in the end, but I believe that morning will come again. Morning always grows out of the darkness, though maybe not for the people who saw the sun go down. We are the Lantern Bearers, my friend; for us to keep something burning, to carry what light we can forward into the darkness and the wind.

We shall have made such a blaze that men will remember us on the other side or the dark.

Why should a deserter take the trouble to light Rutupiae Beacon?" Aquila demanded, and his voice sounded rough in is own ears. "Maybe in farewell, maybe in defiance. Maybe to hold back the dark for one more night.

Esca tossed the slender papyrus roll onto the cot, and set his own hands over Marcus's. "I have not served the Centurion because I was his slave," he said, dropping unconsciously into the speech of his own people. "I have served Marcus, and it was not slave-service...my stomach will be glad when we start on this hunting trail.

Better to be a laughing-stock than lose the fort for fear of being one.