Quotes from Dorothy Dunnett

He was not his own master when he left Russia,' Sybilla said. 'Nor was he his own master when you brought him to France. He is like a river forced into glass and driven from stem to stem of a conjurer's maze without ever reaching the sea.

She could say that no longer. She was his wife in nothing but name: the privacies of his nature were not hers to explore and to analyse: she kept him as far as possible out of her thoughts, and conjecture out of his affairs. 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.

What can be done for these headaches?' [...] 'Short of execution,' Lymond said, 'I think the problem is insoluble.

Patriotism is a fine hothouse for maggots.

There was nothing casual about the blue eyes fixed on the downbent blue gaze of the child. Francis Crawford's face in this fleeting moment of privacy was filled with ungovernable feeling: of shock and of pain and of a desire beyond bearing: the desire of the hart which longs for the waterbrook, and does not know, until it sees the pool under the trees, for what it has thirsted.

For carnal pleasure?' she said, and laughed wildly. 'Like unto Uranus and Gaea? It hadn't occurred to me. On the other hand, it is a gift of Francis's to fill his house with sons bred in incest.

Will you pack up all your cold-boiled emotions, and do what the hell you are told?

The sea demands a man who knows the sea and respects it. A man who is prepared to be lonely. There is no isolation like that of the helm in a storm, except the isolation when it is windless.

Meanwhile Sir Wat Scott of Buccleuch was riding westward from Edinburgh, free at last of the Governor's councils, and leaving behind him his good friend Tom Erskine, a distraught smuggler, and a depressed pig.

Because, I think, of something you said. One should be able to face anything. I have learned to play chess again. I have learned to listen to music, and to play it. I have learned to buy self-indulgence and enjoy it. I have learned to take a line of logic and follow it through, whatever the consequences.

Richard's angry grey eyes … honest grey eyes … were looking at him. Sybilla was not watching. He supposed she knew that however near he might tread to the crevasse, he did not mean to fall in, and drag Richard with him. Instinct had been right, when last year he had fled such a confrontation. As no living soul could hurt him, Sybilla could.

Poverty. Poverty in the presence of starving cold and great, earth-cracking heat, and life lived in the shadow of the wolf and the bear, and tribes more cruel and avaricious. For it was the land which was implacable, far more than its masters.

Quel changement, Strozzi had said, and it was true. The change was there, and not only in the chamois and lawn, replacing the velvet, the rubies, the gold tissue. It was as if all about him had been stripped down and cleansed and reduced, without blurring, to its true structure. And his eyes, which were smiling, were clear.

If I am dead I cannot sponsor your travels. Except, clearly, in a direction you will never be called on to follow.

So long as you allow yourself that kind of self-indulgence, you can expect to have headaches. If you can face anything, then face up to the one basic fact in all this. You told Míkál once, in Thessalonika, that you have never loved anyone. That was a lie. You feel for Sybilla quite as much as she has always felt for you.

In Sevigny, there was something so deep and so dangerous that it could barely be felt. But there was no music. And there was no laughter.

None of that, however, concerned Buccleuch who was little troubled, if ever, with matters of right and wrong.

I do not exist. What you have in your hand is my death certificate.

What I am?' he said. He laughed. 'Don't wait. Ask anyone in London, or Malta, or Russia.' He made his way to the casement and flung it open. The rumour of a crowd, muffled hitherto by the windowpanes, burst fresh upon them. The courtyard and the road beyond the gardens were jostling with people, and the name they were calling was audible: Sevigny. Sevigny. Sevigny.

Four days later, Adam Blacklock was back in Paris. To Jerott, to Danny, to Lady Culter, to Richard Crawford, to anyone else who asked what had happened or who talked to him of the Château of Sevigny he had only one answer to make. For the love of God, leave them alone.

He remembered that clear, icy journey to Lampozhnya, and the sledges arching and hissing across the glittering axle tree of world. For a few days, what he had felt was pure happiness. And what Lymond had known, he now saw, was freedom.

It was dark, even at noon, with the snow stretching white and stark to the violet slate of the sky. The frost, grown stronger and stronger, was an antagonist to be studied and countered, like a runagate thief with a knife.

You Scotsmen: you wish to be like the elephant, hacked to pieces for refusing to bow. You should follow my rule: here am I, supple and amenable as a goatskin glove of Vendôme and pleasant to all, Duke and dotard alike.

I hear you held a feast for our blood-drinking Besermani neighbours, which they attended in two parts, polled head on one side of the field and crossed legs on the other.' 'Rumour exaggerates,' said Lymond politely.