Quotes from Bernard Cornwell

To hear the tales told at night-time hearths you would think we had made a whole new country in Britain, named it Camelot and peopled it with shining heroes, but the truth is that we simply ruled Dumnonia as best we could, we ruled it justly and we never called it Camelot. Camelot exists only in the poets' dreams, while in our Dumnonia, even in those good years, the harvests still failed, the plagues still ravaged us and wars were still fought.

You'll call me a damned Jew, a Christ murderer, a secret worshipper of pigs and a kidnapper of christian children." This was all said cheerfully. "How absurd! Who would want to kidnap children, Christian or otherwise? Vile things. The only mercy of children is that they grow up, as my son has but then, tragically, they beget more children. We do not learn life's lessons.

Madness ends sometimes. The Gods decree it, not man.

You're a bastard, I said. Uhtred, he began, but could find nothing more to say. You're a piece of weasel-shit, I said, you're an earsling. I'm a king, he said, trying to regain his dignity. So you're a royal piece of weasel-shit. An earsling on a throne.

Shit!" Evelgold added. "What?" Hook asked, alarmed. "I just stepped in some." "That's supposed to bring you luck," Hook said. "Then I'd better dance in the goddam stuff.

I wondered why the gods no longer came to earth. It would make belief so much easier.

Wyrd biõ ful ãræd," I said. Fate is fate. It cannot be changed or cheated.

To ask another man's blessing is simply to avoid taking the responsibility.

Start your killers young, before their consciences are grown. Start them young and they will be lethal.

We live in a world where the strongest win, and the strongest must expect to be disliked.

Were the Romans Christians?" I asked him, remembering my curiosity at the Roman farm. "Not always," Ravn said. "They had their own gods once, but they gave them up to become Christians and after that they knew nothing but defeat.

So we all die?' No, no, no! We fight them!' 'How do you fight a dragon?' 'With prayer, boy, with prayer.' 'So we do all die

One of the things I can't stand about Christians is their admiration of meekness. Imagine elevating meekness into a virtue! Meekness! Can you imagine a heaven filled only with the meek? What a dreadful idea. The food would get cold while everyone passed the dishes to everyone else. Meekness is no good, Derfel. Anger and selfishness, those are the qualities that make the world march.

So long as we remember names, so long those people live.

She is a woman, and what women want, they get, and if the world and all it holds must be broken in the getting, then so be it.

Senhor Uhtred! - Como sempre, Willibald reagiu à minha provocação. - Esse peixe - ele apontou o dedo trêmulo na direção dos ossos - foi um dos dois que Nosso Senhor usou para alimentar 5 mil pessoas! - O outro devia ser um peixe incrivelmente grande - respondi. - O que era? Uma baleia?

I had the arrogant confidence of a man born to battle. I am Uhtred, son of Uhtred, son of another Uhtred, and we had not held Bebbanburg and its lands by whimpering at altars. We are warriors.

But deep under the earth, where the corpse serpent gnaws at the roots of Yggdrasil, the tree of life, there are three spinners. Three women who make our fate. We might believe we make choices, but in truth our lives are in the spinners' fingers. They make our lives, and destiny is everything. The Danes know that, and even the Christians know it, Wyrd biõ ful araed, we Saxons say, fate is inexorable.

He sang the song of the sword, keening as he fed his blade, and Rollo, standing thigh-deep in the creek, ax swinging in murderous blows, blocked the enemy's escape. The Frisians, transported from confidence to bowel-loosening fear, began to drop their weapons.

Priests come to my home beside the northern sea where they find an old man, and they tell me I am just a few paces from the fires of hell. I only need repent, they say, and I will go to heaven and live forevermore in the blessed company of the saints. And I would rather burn till time itself burns out.

The gods are capricious, and I was about to amuse them. And Alfred was right. I was a fool.

There is a thing called the blood feud. All societies have them, even the West Saxons have them, despite their vaunted piety. Kill a member of my family and I shall kill one of yours, and so it goes on, generation after generation or until one family is all dead, and Kjartan had just wished a blood feud on himself. I did not know how, I did not know where, I could not know when, but I would revenge Ragnar. I swore it that night.

Doubtless there were insanely frenzied warriors, but there is no evidence that lunatic nudists made regular appearances on the battlefield.

I shook my head. 'Killing isn't woman's work,' I said. 'Why not?' she asked. 'We give life, can't we take it too?