Quotes from Dorothy Dunnett

How old do you think he is?' said Sybilla placidly. 'To tell you the truth, I don't want him hanging about my petticoats for the rest of my life. He is, you must admit, a little disruptive in the home.

Jerott said, as Philippa had done, "And you?" And Lymond stared at him, his brows delicately lifted. "I shall gather frankincense," he replied.

Jerott, who had wished to be alone for his own sake as well as for Lymond's, closed his eyes as he sat under the orange trees, and prayed for Francis Crawford, who did not recognize love, and for himself, who did.

How, in twenty days, do you create for a man a new and irresistible motive for his existence? And how, this done, do you preserve him and his family from a blow so devastating as to be, in some ways, worse than self-destruction?

Today, perhaps, the Gate of the Dead would perform its true office for a small boy whose heritage no one knew; who had lived in squalor and perished in fright. A sacrifice to diminish the soul. A sacrifice to colour all the rest of one's days.

Lymond is back.

As if nothing had happened.' 'Well. Nobody knows.

All your life you have resented control and brooked no hint of instruction or guidance. This time, your will is not paramount.

No ties; no duty; no relief. Three filaments gone in the life-thread, fragile as the thread of the silk-moth, which has no organs by which it can nourish itself, but instead is born, and loves once, and then dies.

Irregular relationships among a royal family and its adherents were a matter of course; often a matter of business; and only occasionally a matter of love.

At every second location Danny said monotonously, 'You can't do that,' and Plummer bridled and said, 'They built Sviajsk three years ago in four weeks. They felled the timber at Uglich and floated the logs down the Volga——' 'The cost. The cost, you fool!' Danny would scream.

I'm glad, in a way," Lymond said. "I couldn't quite bring myself to attack them, lunatics that they are." "You are sentimental," said Nicolas de Nicolay complacently. "But the tender stomach does not attack the pure—no—not even the pure in stupidity.

Andrew's a nice, gentlemanly lad, but his estate's been bled dry; and as for the ill-armed crew he calls followers—Man, they'd lay on a battlefield like dandruff.

Blacklock, Adam, is drawing maps,' Danny said. 'Having been offered the position of cartographer with the Muscovy Company at twenty pounds per annum when you have departed, and having accepted with alacrity. D'Harcourt, Ludo, has got a new woman at Smithfield. Neither of them is likely to burst in on us.' 'And you?' Lymond said. He did not, to Danny's regret, address him as Hislop, Daniel.

Come in,' he said. 'You can use Adam's rooms.' His hand, moving upwards, drew the fair, tangled hair clear of Lymond's eyes and checked, at the shudder that ran jarring through from his fingertips. Lymond dropped his hands. He made no protest. He did not look up. But unimpeded at last, Jerott could see the look on his face and give it, sickeningly, its correct interpretation.

I am like the Swiss. I prefer not to fight on a Wednesday.

There are those that want to take time and men to hunt down Lymond and his band of murderers; and those that demand that Culter should lead them as proof of his loyalty. But if Richard Crawford of Culter won't interfere; says he has better business to attend to and refuses flatly to hound down his brother baying like the Wild Jagd, that still doesn't make him a traitor.

The arrangement, temporary or otherwise, was usually public and acknowledged when at the highest level; only when it was clandestine and conducted to the injury of legitimate relatives did it become untenable in the oblique moral eye of society.

Lancelot Plummer had expected to undertake this survey with Adam, but had been foiled calmly in passing by Lymond. 'Ah, no. One aesthete and one philistine are what we require.' There could have been few philistines, thought Plummer acidly, as insistently common as Hislop.

Other people married young, to men they didn't know, and had no dispensation such as she had. To sleep alone; to plan her own destiny. A virgin married, with a son not her own….Kate always said, thought Philippa, blinking, that the Somervilles were mad to a man.

He and Richard had met on the strand at Philorth and like the sand under their feet, all the muddled solicitude which had prompted that journey had in five minutes dispersed through their fingers.

Like the narration of those who preach to those who do not wish to hear, my story has failed to excite anyone. They don't believe me.

He shrugged. "One escapes; but one always has to come back. I found too I disliked not being in command of myself.

Señor, more wine? I am amazed,' said the captain, 'that so lovely a lady has not married.' 'But indeed she has married,' said Lymond. 'Five times. And not one husband, poor fellow, survived matrimony by more than a year. She is too good for them. The last one, dying, compared her to a nugget of gold. Do you melt it or do you rub it or do you beat it, said he, it shineth still more orient.