Quotes from Dorothy Dunnett

Do you think I bring any child into the world to live for himself alone?

All I gathered from that is that Francis Crawford is a raging harlot.

You summon and you throw away. You treat love like a bird for the table … Like a pawn, now in frankincense, now discarded and thrown in the dirt. You don't know what love is, either of you. And God help us and you, if you ever find out.

I do not know whether this man is a traitor or not, but he is an individualist, and in war the two are the same.

And did you mean to honour your promise?" Sybilla said.

A lie is a broad and spacious and glittering thing, sweeping belief before it from its very grandeur. But the truth fits, like an old man cutting cloth in an attic.

You have a tongue, have you not, which breaks backs? I have madness in many forms, but that which springs from the passions of the heart is not in my nature. That is all. We are all fashioned differently.

And for Adam Blacklock the artist, older, wiser, and perhaps less vulnerable than once he had been, a chance to assess from maturity a person whose maturity was and always had been a thing disconcerting to witness. For what, after these violent years, would entertain or even interest Francis Crawford, Blacklock found he had no idea.

You don't remember?" Sybilla said. "No. I don't suppose you do. You begged a favour of me, and once it was granted you had no reason to remember your promise. I will remind you. You said, 'I will promise anything. I will do anything you wish, to the end of my life, if you will tell me the name of the house that you know of.

It partook,' said Kate, 'of the nature of a full-scale cursing against one Crawford of Lymond, but whether for sins of omission or commission is not entirely clear.

From the door, he glanced back, once, at the unresponsive wreck of the room. 'Then God damn your soul!' he said, and walked out.

It was to be expected that when he became in turn a leader of men, Francis should prove hard on others; should observe no laws; should fight, regardless of method, for victory.

Open the casement and lean out, glowing. All they want to do is report to Austin that you listened to them without apparently having a seizure.

Adam said, 'Christ!' and Danny Hislop, wriggling past said, 'No. Lord Culter, I do declare.

Later, learning to know him, a friendship had grown: odd, irregular; at times surprisingly deep. And at times marred, it seemed wantonly, by Lymond's excesses and his own lack of trust towards Richard which again and again had caused his older brother anger and misery.

It was a short journey, and more fateful than any one of them knew. A journey inevitable from the day Francis Crawford was born, and set firm in his stars where already old eyes had distinguished it and younger eyes, also far-seeing, had chosen to ignore and defy it.

I sometimes wonder," said Francis Crawford, "if I only exist to be sacrificed to." Her heart beating strongly, she watched him. "Perhaps," she said. "But if you accept sacrifices, you must respond with acts of reparation.

What intelligent remedy, like jumping in the river, do you suggest if we find this man Lymond irreconcilably dreadful?

whole oxen confessed to the fires at each end and reached sizzling Judgment on the crowded tables, alongside pies and puddings and heaped fragrant trenchers and jars of bland, too-warm wines.

She told me one night that she had no wish to go on living, and that if she did, it could only harm you. She was thirteen years old.… Can you not stand still, and look me in the face, and give me an answer?

About his lengthening absence, Kathi spoke only once, and then obliquely, for there were some things too painful for words.

Your right to die? They accept that already. It is I," said Sybilla, "who do not.

If you are asking, did Eloise make no effort to avoid the explosion which killed her, the answer is probably yes. If you are also asking, was I her lover, the answer is no. After all,' said Lymond, 'that would be incest.' And with a click, the door closed finally after him.

So,' said Mary, 'you would condemn the human race to hell, for want of enlightenment?' 'Why not?' said Francis Crawford. 'It has nothing to fear, surely, from hell.