Quotes from Bernard Cornwell

French desecrated the cathedral. They plundered the treasury and tore down most of the screens.

Your answer to the truth," I sneered, "is to threaten a woman with death?

We are not climbing Jacob's ladder to some heavenly perfection, but stumbling downhill towards Ragnarok.

we had come with the thunder and now left with the dawn.

Have you ever fought in a battle? I know you burned down my barns, but that isn't a battle, you stinking piece of rat-gristle. A battle is the shield wall. It's smelling your enemy's breath while he tries to disembowel you with an ax, it's blood and shit and screams and pain and terror. It's trampling in your friends' guts as enemies butcher them. It's men clenching their teeth so hard they shatter them. Have you ever been in a battle?

Put a cat to guard the sheep and the wolves would eat well.

If they saw men swarming up the wall, if they saw the axes chopping at our shields on the wall's top, then they would join the battle. Men want to be on the winning side.

had given an oath and honor binds us to paths we might not choose.

Wyrd bið ful ãræd," I told Finan. Fate is inexorable.

but he dared not move. He was a whipped

A man does not go into battle without fear.

I'm in pain all the time," I said, "and if I gave in to it then I'd do nothing.

Odi at amo, excrucior

Alfred spends half his time rutting and the other half praying to his god to forgive him for rutting. How can a god disapprove of a good hump?

The hellequin," she said icily, "are the dead who have no souls. The dead who were so wicked in life that the devil loves them too much to punish them in hell and so he gives them his horses and releases them on the living.

If the purpose of life was to be an unpredictable, murderous tyrant, then it would be easy to be godlike, but I suspected we had a different duty and that was to try to make the world better.

One thing I learned about the Danes was that they knew how to spy. The monks who write the chronicles tell us that they came from nowhere, their dragon-prowed ships suddenly appearing from a blue vacancy, but it was rarely like that. The Viking crews might attack unexpectedly, but the big fleets, the war fleets, went where they knew there was already trouble. They found an existing wound and filled it like maggots.

our oaths.' He advanced down the path

I know I have gained Christ and through His blessing I have gained the whole world too, but for what I have lost, for what we have all lost, there is no end to the reckoning. We lost everything.

É uma coisa estranha que notei com relação aos cristãos. Eles afirmam que nossos deuses não têm poder, no entanto temem às maldições feitas em nome desses deuses.

If a man breaks an oath he has no honour

And in that great hall of the gods I will meet so many men that I once fought, whom I killed, and we shall feast together and watch the middle-earth beneath us and see men fight as we once fought, and so the world will go on till Ragnarok's chaos engulfs it.

When Odin lost an eye, he gained wisdom, but when Svein lost an eye he learned fear.

Soldiers were not paragons; they were scarred, vicious men who took delight in destruction.