Quotes from Bernard Cornwell

Why did I choose to fight him? He was going to die whether I fought him or not, and he was dangerous, half my age and a warrior. But it is reputation, always reputation. Pride, I suppose, is the most treacherous of virtues.

superb book Mercia and the Making of England (Sutton Publishing, Stroud, 2000).

You spent it on oil for your hair,' I said, 'and on baubles for your whores, on furs and on horses, on jewels and on silk. A man, Lord Eardwulf, dresses in leather and iron. And he fights.

Mothers were sacred. Mothers were not expected to be pretty.

What in the holy name of a holy harlot,' Culhwch asked Galahad, 'is a holy ghost?

But I hated Alfred. I hated him for humiliating me at Exanceaster when he had made me wear a penitent's robe and crawl on my knees. Nor did I think of him as my king. He was a West Saxon and I was a Northumbrian, and I reckoned so long as he was king then Wessex had small chance of surviving. He believed God would protect him from the Danes, while I believed they had to be defeated by swords.

He's like a man putting wattle hurdles in the face of a flood. -Brace a hurdle well and it'll turn a stream.

From the far north, lord. From the land of ice and birch. Strange things happen there. They say men can fly in the darkness, and I did hear that the dead walk on the frozen seas, but I never saw such a thing.

It's hard to force obedience without encouraging resentment.

Prince Cadwy of Isca was there, and King Melwas of the Belgae and Prince Gereint, Lord of the Stones, while distant Kernow, the savage kingdom at Britain's western tip, had sent its edling, Prince Tristan, who sat swathed in wolf fur at the dais's edge next to one of the two vacant thrones.

and the story had to be told again, and Sharpe felt

the French, as they had always intended, broke their truce.

Men weeping because they had met the horror, and it was us. We were the wolf pack of Bebbanburg and we had taken back what Ida the Flamebearer had first won.

name's sake.' The men called out amen and some

Wyrd bi ful aræd, fate is unstoppable.

Children are easily swayed by religion, which is why it is a good thing that most eventually grow into sense.

He was a hard man, but what else would he be? He had stood in the shield wall, he had watched the Danes come to the attack, and he had lived. He was no youngster.

Just remember, Braithwaite. While you were learning to be a fool at Oxford I was learning to kill men. And I learned well.

Entendo que é possível olhar nos olhos de alguém e de súbito saber que a vida será impossível sem eles. Saber que a voz da pessoa pode fazer seu coração falhar, e que a companhia dessa pessoa é tudo que sua felicidade pode desejar, e que a ausência dela deixará sua alma solitária, desolada e perdida.

Did I know all that at eleven? Some, I think. It lay in my heart, unformed, unspoken, but hard as a stone. It would be covered over in time, half forgotten and often contradicted, but it was always there. Destiny is all, Ravn liked to tell me, destiny is everything. He would even say it in English, "Wyrd bi ful aræd.

man. We make much in this life if we are able. We make children and wealth and amass land and build halls and assemble armies and give great feasts, but only one thing survives us. Reputation. I

grumbled. "You can say it. You're a Catholic?" "Christ, I haven't seen a church in ten years," Harper said. "I doubt God listens to me." "He doesn't even know I exist. I wonder if Dan prayed?

You're a boy playing in men's games, Sharpie, and you're going to lose unless you're a man. Are you man enough to fight me here? Put me down? Claim I was kicked by a horse in the night? You can try, Sharpie, but you're not man enough, are you?

You take me for a fool, Douglas?" "I take you as you show yourself, John Randolph