Quotes from Bernard Cornwell

Sigtryggr had been given an honorable place at the table, as had my daughter. "It was her fault," Sigtryggr said, nodding toward Stiorra. I translated for Æthelflaed. "Why her fault?" she asked. "He saw her and was distracted," I explained.

weakness invites war

You're giving up the hunt for de Taillebourg?' Thomas asked. He had learned the priest's name from Robbie. 'No.' Robbie still had his head back as he stared at the magnificence of the transept's ceiling. 'I'll find him and then I'll gralloch the bastard.' Thomas did not know what gralloch meant, but decided the word was bad news for de Taillebourg.

Wessex. At the very least Alfred would pay

You told these bastards they had till New Year's Day?' 'Yes, sir.' 'Then break your word, Major. Go and kill them at Christmas instead.' 'Yes, sir.

I knew it was stupid, knew I would probably die if I went again, but we were warriors and warriors will not be beaten. It is reputation. It is pride. It is the madness of battle. I began beating Serpent-Breath against my half-broken shield, and other men took up the rhythm, and the Danes, so close, were inviting us to come and be killed, and I shouted that we were coming.

The sight of that loveliness was enough to drive all sense from a man's head.

He'll fight like a bull and he's honest. But does he think like a wildcat?

Does that girl work here?' Robbie asked, gesturing at the screen behind which Mary had disappeared. 'All her life,' Sir Giles said. 'You remember Mary, Thomas?' 'I tried to drown her when we were both children,' Thomas said.

You will tell him that Uhtred of Bebbanburg is in a mood to kill.

The first stone, thrown by Hellgiver, crashed through the roof of a dyer's house close to St Brieuc's church and took off the heads of an English man-at-arms and the dyer's wife. A joke went through the garrison that the two bodies were so crushed together by the boulder that they would go on coupling throughout eternity.

Bishop Asser was an earsling, which is anything that drops out of an arse.

Once you write something down it becomes fixed. It becomes dogma. People can argue about it, they become authoritative, they refer to the texts, they produce new manuscripts, they argue more and soon they're putting each other to death. If you never write anything down then no one knows exactly what you said so you can always change it.

Instinct is a strange thing. You cannot touch it, feel it, smell it, or hear it, but you must trust it.

The Reign of Edward III by W. Mark Ormrod; and Edward III by the same

Fate, Merlin always said, is inexorable

Wyn eal gedreas. Isso é parte de outro poema que às vezes ouço ser cantado no meu castelo. É um poema triste, e portanto um poema verdadeiro. Wyrd bið ful ãræd, diz ele. O destino é inexorável. E wyn eal gedreas. Toda alegria morreu.

If there's one thing a Puritan fears, it's a woman.

Empurrei a bolsa para ele e me tornei instantaneamente pobre. Ragnar a empurrou de volta sem sequer pensar, tornando-me rico de novo

There, ahead of me, was the enemy. I love the Danes. There are no better men to fight with, drink with, laugh with or live with. Yet that day, as on so many others of my life, they were the enemy and they waited for me in a gigantic shield wall arrayed across the down. There were thousands of Danes, Spear-Danes and Sword-Danes, Danes who had come to make this land theirs, and we had come to keep it ours.

The spinners were watching me, waiting, needles poised, and unless I did their bidding then my fate would be failure.

It is as though life slows. The enemy moves as if he is wading in mud, but I was kingfisher fast. There is rage, but it is a controlled rage, and there is joy, the joy that the poets celebrate when they speak of battle, and a certainty that death is not in that day's fate.

You are sheep, they are wolves. Your blood will soak the hillsides, your skin will make saddles, your flesh will feed pigs!

Of the insolence of the Scots, my father used to say, there is no end.