Quotes from Bernard Cornwell

No, fate is difficult. Is all ordained? Foreknowledge is not fate, and we may choose our paths, yet fate says we may not choose them. So if fate is real, do we have choice?

And next morning, as my stepmother wept on the ramparts of the High Gate, and under a blue, clean sky, we rode to war. Two hundred and fifty men went south, following our banner of the wolf's head. That was in the year 867, and it was the first time I ever went to war. And I have never ceased.

Silence. We like it when an audience is silent, when no one coughs, no one shuffles, no one cracks a nut, or uncorks an ale bottle with a sudden hiss. Silence means the play is working, and we have the audience in our power. To a player, that breathless silence is better than applause, and that morning in the great hall my audience was silent.

An army, I learned in time, needs a head. It needs one man to lead it, but give an army two leaders and you halve its strength.

I could imagine Cnut sitting there and thinking that I must join him soon, and we would raise a horn of ale together. There is no pain in Valhalla, no sadness, no tears, no broken oaths.

Someone wise, I forget who, said we must leave our children to fate.

And, in her fury, she slapped the king with a skinned eel.

Who do you serve?" Lanferelle asked. "Sir John Cornerwailled," Hook said proudly. Lanferelle was pleased. "Sir John! Ah, there's a man. His mother must have slept with a Frenchman.

Beware the man who loves battle. Ravn had told me that only one man in three or perhaps one man in four is a real warrior and the rest are reluctant fighters, but I was to learn that only one man in twenty is a lover of battle. Such men were the most dangerous, the most skillful, the ones who reaped the souls, and the ones to fear.

The rules were simple: trust no one, be ever watchful and if trouble came hit first and hit hard. It had worked for him so far.

It was funny, Richard Sharpe thought, that there were no vultures in England.

When those blades cut, they cause tears that feed the well of Urdr that lies beside the world tree, and the well gives the water that keeps Yggdrasil alive, and if Yggdrasil dies then the world dies, and so the well must be kept filled and for that there must be tears.

Do you really think men and women thanked you for bringing them peace? They just became bored with your peace and so brewed their own trouble to fill the boredom. Men don't want peace, Arthur, they want distraction from tedium

There comes a moment in life when we see ourselves as others see us. I suppose that is part of growing up, and it is not always comfortable. Eanflæd

Fight well, he said distantly, and remember you are Englishmen! Welshmen, someone intervened. Sir Roger visibly flinched at that and then, without another word, led his three men-at-arms from the church.

The world began in chaos and it will end in chaos. The gods brought the world into existence, and they will end it when they fight among themselves, but in between the chaos of the world's birth and the chaos of the world's death is order, and order is made by oaths, and oaths bind us like the buckles of a harness.

He sounded pathetic and he knew it, but he had been driven to this humiliation by love. A woman can do that. They have power. We might all say that the oath to our lord is the strong oath that guides our lives, the oath that binds us and rules all the other oaths, but few men would not abandon every oath under the sun for a woman. I have broken oaths. I am not proud of that, but almost every oath I broke was for a woman.

We are almost men, not quite warriors, and on some fateful day we meet an enemy for the first time and we hear the chants of battle, the threatening clash of blades on shields, and we begin to learn that the poets are wrong and that the proud songs lie.

It will never end. Till the world ends in the chaos of Ragnarok, we will fight for our women, for our land, and for our homes. Some Christians speak of peace, of the evil of war, and who does not want peace? But then some crazed warrior comes screaming his god's filthy name into your face and his only ambitions are to kill you, to rape your wife, to enslave your daughters, and take your home, and so you must fight.

Are all Dumnonian warriors so ill-mannered? she asked the table at large in an acid voice. You want warriors to be courtiers? Celwin retorted brusquely. You'd send your precious poets to kill the Franks? And I don't mean by reciting their verses at them, though come to think of it that might be quite effective. He leered at the Queen and the three poets shuddered.

It's better to make the wrong choice, my father had continued, than to make no choice at all.

I think only one man in three is a warrior, and sometimes not even that many, but in our army, Uhtred, every man is a fighter. If you do not want to be a warrior you stay home in Denmark. You till the soil, herd sheep, fish the sea, but you do not take to the ships and become a fighter. But here in England? Every man is forced to the fight, yet only one in three or maybe only one in four has the belly for it. The rest are farmers who just want to run. We are wolves fighting sheep.

I remember Ragnar laughing one day. It is so kind of the Christians! They put their wealth in one building and mark it with a great cross! It makes life so easy.

I had learned to hide my soul, or perhaps I was confused. Northumbrian or Dane? Which was I? What did I want to be?