Quotes from Bernard Cornwell

Because when he returns, Richard, he would be the biggest man in town. He wants revenge on his childhood. He wants the respect of the town. Saint Paul tells us that when we were children we spoke as children, we understood and thought as children but when we become men we put away childish things, but I'm not so sure we ever do put them away. I think the childish things linger on, and your brother craves what he wanted as a child, the respect of his home town

and that was the first truthful answer he had given to the Norseman. For the priest had held a sword many times before and he did know how to fight and I doubted he was ready to die. He was Father Pyrlig.

Battle assaults the senses, and that assault ferments fear, and obedience is the narrow thread that leads out of fear's chaos into survival.

Your mother didn't give birth to you," I told him, "but farted you out of her shriveled arsehole.

People like mystery. They want nothing explained, because when things are explained then there is no hope left.

nosotros, los paganos, rara vez perseguimos a los cristianos. Porque somos de ésos que creemos que hay muchos dioses y damos por buena la religión de cualquiera, algo que consideramos que entra dentro de lo personal, en tanto que los cristianos, con su empecinamiento en la idea de un solo dios, consideran que obligación suya es matar, mutilar, esclavizar o denostar a quienquiera que no esté de acuerdo con su forma de pensar.

after that I can die in peace instead of having to explain the most elementary matters to absurdly credulous halfwits. And

And suddenly, after weeks of thinking about desertion, Sharpe realized that what he had just said was true. He did want to go back to the army, and that knowledge surprised him. The army had bored Richard Sharpe, then done its best to break his spirits. It had even flogged him, but now, standing on Seringapatam's battlements, he missed the army. For at heart, as Richard Sharpe had just discovered for himself, he was a soldier.

ignored Truslow, trusting instead in the Colonel's largesse.

There's no written life of him that I know of," Alfred said, "but we must surely compose one. He could be a saint for mothers." "Or for wheelbarrows, lord.

You do not swing in a shield wall, you stab. May the gods ever send me enemies who swing their blades.

the French had torn away the silverwork, wrenched down the statues, and ripped the triptychs from their frames.

We're not puppets in God's hands. We are his instruments. We earn our fate.

If you wait for certainty in war, lord king, you'll die waiting.

Poor as an honest lawyer.

Life is a story without an end.

it's a foolish king who doesn't listen to his advisers. -It's a foolish king, who doesn't know which advisers to trust.

I envy your Christian God. He is three and He is one, He is dead and He is alive, He is everywhere and He is nowhere, and He demands that you worship Him, but claims nothing else is worthy of worship. There's room in those contradictions for a man to believe in anything or nothing, but

In the middle of the nineteenth century a railway line was made from London's Fenchurch Street to Southend and, when excavating at what is now South Benfleet (Beamfleot), the navvies discovered the charred remnants of burned ships among which were scattered human skeletons. Those remains were over nine hundred years old, and they were what was left of Haesten's army and fleet. I

Frederick the Great once said that the greatest crime in war is not to make the wrong decision, but to make no decision.' Again the Prince gestured at Sharpe with the brandy glass. 'You should remember that axiom, Sharpe!' Sharpe did not even know what an axiom was, but he nodded respectfully. 'I will, sir.

They have no idea we're here. And stupidity gets you killed.

I had broken three Saxon shield-walls and buried Hywelbane to her hilt in my country's enemies before I had been elected to Mithras's service, but all Lancelot had ever done was boast and posture.

much followed from that hurried ceremony in the flower-speckled clearing beside the stream. So many died. There was so much heartache, so much blood and so many tears that they would have made a great river; yet, in time, the eddies smoothed, new rivers joined, and the tears went down to the great wide sea and some people forgot how it ever began. The time of glory did come, yet what might have been never did, and of all those who were hurt by that moment in the sun, Arthur was hurt the most.

Love is a dangerous thing. It comes in disguise to change our life.