Quotes from Dorothy Dunnett

Disdainful of fur and fretful, privately, about the cost of his buttons, Jerott Blyth sat like the born horseman he was, and watched discreetly for trouble.

What does anyone want out of life? What kind of freak do you suppose I am? I miss books and good verse and decent talk. I miss women, to speak to, not to rape; and children, and men creating things instead of destroying them. And from the time I wake until the time I find I can't go to sleep there is the void—the bloody void where there was no music today and none yesterday and no prospect of any tomorrow, or tomorrow, or next God-damned year.

To pass over grief, they say, the Italian sleeps; the Frenchman sings; the German drinks; the Spaniard laments, and the Englishman goes to plays. What then does the Scot?' To Jerott's mind sprang, unbidden, a picture of the sword Archie Abernethy was trying to clean at this moment below. 'This one,' he said, 'kills.

Not to every young girl is it given to enter the harem of the Sultan of Turkey and return to her homeland a virgin.

Lymond surveyed the grinning audience with an air of gentle discovery. "Is there no work to be done? Or perhaps it's a holiday?

Did I ever tell you,' said Lymond pausing on the afterthought, on his way to the flap, 'that that aunt of mine once hatched an egg?' He paused, deep in thought, and walked slowly to the door before turning again. His lordship of Aubigny, staring after the vanishing form of his brother, received the full splendour of Lymond's smile. 'It was a cuckoo,' said Francis Crawford prosaically, and followed Lennox out.

The war between England and Scotland was in its eighth year and there had been no raid for ten days: it had seemed possible to get married in peace.

To save our friends' nerves, I suggest we meet on a plane of brutal courtesy. It need not interfere with our mutual distrust." -Francis Crawford of Lymond

Habits are the ruin of ambition, of initiative, of imagination.

Philippa allowed polite regret to inform every muscle. 'Whatever day it occurs,' she said, 'I feel I have a previous engagement.' 'May I congratulate you,' he said agreeably, 'on your evident popularity.' 'Anything I can do,' Philippa said, 'to save you from the exhaustions of pluralism.

Leaving him was less like leaving even the most simple of her friends in Flaw Valleys, and more like losing unfinished a manuscript, beautiful, absorbing and difficult, which she had long wanted to read.

You might, without my crediting it, fall deeply in love and forever, with some warped hunchback whelped in the gutter. I should equally stop you from taking him.

And at thirty-eight a brilliant exponent of arms and a knight of the great fighting and religious Order of St John, the Chevalier de Villegagnon had absolutely no use for common sense himself, but respected it in the laity.

Lucent and delicate, Drama entered, mincing like a cat.

Lion-hearted; her tremors braced with virtue, Philippa trotted on.

It won't be long,' said Philippa cheerfully, her mother's ring in her voice. 'You know what Bess says. There's nothing in this world a drop of aqua-vitæ in a sheep's bladder won't cure. Stop the Somervilles with a knife! It needs artillery.' And she blew her nose hard.

There was a silence. 'You didn't as,' said Jerott at length. 'But I would have forgone even the body for the sake of the mind. And I would have claimed neither body nor mind, had I discovered a soul.

Subject to intelligence, nothing is incalculable.

when two friends discuss money, the third friend should invariably be asleep.

Speak, she said, as you would write: as if your words were letters of lead, graven there for all time, for which you must take the consequences. And take the consequences.

I don't like this war. I don't like the cold-blooded scheming at the beginning and the carnage at the end and the grumbling and the jealousies and the pettishness in the middle. I hate the lack of gallantry and grace; the self-seeking; the destruction of valuable people and things. I believe in danger and endeavor as a form of tempering but I reject it if this is the only shape it can take.

Haven't I been worth five years' excellent gossip to you? Are you not all waiting agog to see me seize my sister-in-law by the hair? When I think of it, damn it, I'm a public benefactor.

Don't you think you should retire again? The first retiral seems to have got mislaid.

You haven't enough artillery, have you?' 'Against you or the Germans?' said Lymond.