Quotes from Dorothy Dunnett

You know we believe Philippa.' 'Perhaps I envy her,' Lymond said. 'No one believes me.

Good God, here am I with stockings in either hand, panting towards restitution. I merely require you to keep my soul out of the general conversation.' 'And your brother's soul?' said James Stewart. He was drawling again. 'I understood,' said Lymond, 'that you had that in hand.

It is not enough,' Robert Reid said, 'to offer justice. The laws of men, the laws of God himself are not enough unless you know the heart, the tongue, the brain, the gut of your people.

We're all runts and bastards of one sort or another.

Like King Lewis of Hungary, who was immaturely born, came of age too soon and was immaturely married, my age is out of joint with my phenomenal destiny.

He had never used his own sword since it came to him. He had never fought Simon equally before, except with poles, which had nearly been the end of him; and in a crazy chase through water where he had finished being bayed down by hounds. He could handle a polestaff well now, and had had himself taught to swim perfectly. He wondered, drawing the new, shining blade, what other skills Simon would force him to master. Finding a method of resurrection, perhaps.

Because he knew … God, he knew! Jerott's terrible romanticism, which would taste death so readily; so splendidly offer the blood of his fellows, in defence of the weak and the puny.

I once heard a man speak, who had understanding, and the promise of vision. He was called the Master of Culter.

It would have made a fitting tomb, she supposed, for Thady Boy Ballagh. That it was fitting for Francis Crawford she would not believe.

But you do not know me,' Lymond said. 'Whereas I know you exceedingly well. You should be glad. I may well find it tedious; but you should have an extremely interesting journey.

Why are you here?" Silence. Then the boy said slowly, "Because I admire you.

As a man, this child would be one's offering to the future races of men. The burden of his upbringing, wherever it fell: however tiresome or onerous, was of no importance compared with his living grasp of the future.

Why not,' said Gaultier viciously, 'play chess?' It silenced Lymond. His head went back as if he had been struck, the indrawn air caught in his throat. He said nothing more.

And then the blue eyes, with gentleness, scanned all her new-made body and came to rest on her eyes. 'I have begun to eat,' said Francis Crawford. 'And I have begun to slake my thirst. But in you I have found a banquet under the heavens that will serve me for ever.

Jerott, his face frowning with sleeplessness, was looking at Richard, this powerful man with the brilliant grey eyes who had not contemplated bereavement with stoicism but was rebelling, as Sybilla was not rebelling, against what he had found.

You're so damned brilliant, said Phelim. You know everything. It's hard-set you'd be to give yourself a dull Saturday afternoon. We're all puppets—not the old Queens only, but the rest of us, man, woman and child, looking the fools of the world. [...] You have them there, on their strings, all curled tight to your littlest finger; and you little heeding as you swing them what soul you may bruise.

What was original sin? Was it more than an arbitrary pattern set in the loom, of talents and weaknesses, picked out from the warp of one's forebears?

Give me a moment. Sit down on that bloody rock for a minute, and let me try to explain. And listen to me as if I weren't related. Can you make some sort of frenetic endeavour, and pretend to do that? Because in the only sense that matters, Richard, it's true.

The gorgeous creature by the window did not move, nor was there a notable change in his plumage. But by some means it was made clear that against the latticed panes of the casement stood a man trained for war, and with skills of a sort which had protected Lyons; had saved Paris; had recovered Calais for an alien monarch.

After five years of villainy, I promise you, I have the refinement of a cow-cabbage.

He is not going to come back now, for me, for you or for anyone. This time he has found the boatman, and the boatman has taken him over.

How nice," said Lymond, "to have simple emotions. No trouble with principles; no independence of thought; no resistance to suggestion; no nonsense about adult behaviour when it comes to one's own amour propre.

For good steel, we should fire it as the Voevoda tells me you do, with stone coal. But our workmen are ignorant. We need metallurgists to find our ores and show us best how to mine them. Men come from Germany, from Italy, and then they leave us. We need ironfounders to teach us how to refine the metal, and forge it. Then we would have the best and cheapest steel in the world.

Are you mourning? Seneca says a wise man lives as long as he ought, not so long as he can. You should be pleased. At last Francis has managed to follow his own misguided path without the rest of us consuming time and energy on setting him right.