Quotes from Dorothy Dunnett

I told her grace that he might not marry the girl if she lost the use of her limbs or her dowry; but I couldn't think of anything else that would deter him.

My part in the prophecy is fulfilled. Yours has still to come. Whatever made you think you were free?

Thomas, first Baron Wharton of Wharton, sat in his chair. "Boy," he said. "Listen to me, and learn the first lesson of man, the political animal. When you wage war, you wage it for ever. When war is over, it has never existed...

Gabriel thinks a lot of you.' 'I thought I talked too much for his comfort,' said Lymond. 'But I hear he has a ravishing sister. I must mend my ways.

How do you take leave, for all time, of a brother?" "You wish him well," Lymond said, "if that is what is in your mind. And you accept from him his understanding, and his pity, and his fellowship as he is driven, as you are, through the world.

Right? said Lymond. You pathetic, maladroit nincompoop, you're never right.

The master had gone very red. 'My lord, there can only be one who commands on a ship.' 'That is correct. And you have kindly handed me your authority for a day,' Lymond said. 'Go and sleep. I shall give you your ship back at nightfall.' His jaw jutting, the master turned on Lord Culter. 'I will stand security for him,' said Richard gravely. 'If he chips the shaft of an oar, I shall pay for it.

With his education and heritage, Harry Darnley will be the only turncoat in England who can practise sodomy in Alcaic stanzas.

I don't like to see things done badly on either. At the moment, I am tired of journeys. It is time I arrived somewhere.

You see someone before you who is not afraid to say what he thinks, provided he is in a position of ascendancy with a door open behind him and a knife gripped in each hand.

any country which has suffered a reverse of fortune instantly turns on its nonconformists.

And Richard was silent, for the truth Jerott had seen touched him, too, for a moment before he thrust it aside. He said, instead, 'Once, I returned, by mistake, a present you gave me.' As when he had come in, fresh from the wind, surprise and pleasure roused, for an instant, all the colour in his brother's face. Francis Crawford said, 'I have kept it, in case one day you might want it. If you do … It makes worthwhile this part, at least, of the journey.

Oh, Christ, Richard,' Lymond said. 'You don't need to remind me what country I belong to.

She may be hoping for Lug of the Long Arms but what she has is the family Crawford, qui peut de tous bois faire flèches in order to sit in the butts and shoot hearty rounds at each other.

You wouldn't expect me to make social calls if you had the remotest idea of the work entailed in bringing two unfortunate persons to the altar.' Careless words. 'It takes ten minutes, in my experience,' Lymond said.

I have been told to live in Scotland, and I shall do it, but I doubt if it will be to Scotland's benefit. There are handicaps, I have found, more crippling than blindness. Even the part of me that did not come back from Dourlans would hardly have made you a whole man.

In Francis, there was so much that was admirable; and the flaws were so great. Yet one forgot them.

THE ELEGANT WORKING out of designs historical and romantic, political and commercial, psychological and moral, over a multivolume novel is a Dorothy Dunnett specialty.

And Hislop?' said Lymond softly. 'Don't sound so aggrieved. There are no rewards, celestial or mundane, for the best display of pure, bloody inquisitiveness.' Which drove Ludovic d'Harcourt to a deduction, five minutes later, as Daniel Hislop marched into his room. 'Let me make a guess. He is awake.' 'He's awake. The honeymoon,' said Danny, 'is over.

For a moment Lymond remained there, surveying them. His eight officers, staring edgily back, saw a delicate-looking gentleman in a pretty paned and pinked tunic with the finest voile shirt bands and a link-belt of Italian enamel work. A man whose yellow hair, dry and light and unevenly tipped, eclipsed the sunlight behind him, and whose attic profile and unoccupied, long-shafted hands caused a small moan of ecstasy to burst, very circumspectly, from Mr Hislop's baby-pink lips.

This officer, but doubt, is callit deid.

que je vive, mon cueur ne changera Ã¢â'¬Â¦ Mon chois est fait, aultre ne se fera Ã¢â'¬Â¦

You will stand there and let me refer to Madame la putaine your mother? You will watch while I call my sergeant in to listen while I brand you bastard?' 'No,' said Lymond.

He did not want to live. As the condition of life does, so the condition of death should depend on one's choice. The wise man lives as long as he ought, not as long as he can. Democrites fell on his sword; Aruntius killed himself to fly both the past and the future; Crates said that love would be cured by hunger, if not by time; and whoever disliked these two remedies, by a rope.