Quotes from Dorothy Dunnett

No!' said Master Bailey loudly. 'No, you'll not get these lads to leave me. They're good English lads, and they're here to protect me and mine.' 'From Mistress Philippa?' Lymond said hopefully. 'From you and your mercenaries, you contrary churl!

To succeed as you want, you have to be precise; you have to have polish; you have to carry polish and precision into everything you do. You have no time to sigh over seigneuries and begrudge other people their gifts. Lack of genius never held anyone back," said Lymond. "Only time wasted on resentment and daydreaming can do that.

You see," said Marthe. "I am not here to mock. I have worn out my revenge. You have guided me into a world which has been closed to me all my life. You have shown me that what I hold by, you hold by and more. You have shown me strength I do not possess, and humanity I thought belonged only to women. You are a man, and you have explained all men to me….

Lord Culter watched them come. There was about him none of the mad abandon of the bridegroom. A sober, thickset figure with brown hair and reliable grey eyes, Richard Crawford in his thirties was a man of wealth and tried power. He waited, his face stony, and before Buccleuch opened his mouth, he spoke. "If it's about Lymond, don't trouble, Buccleuch." "It's about Lymond," said Sir Wat grimly, and let fly.

He isn't coming,' said Adam. 'Splendid,' said Piero Strozzi heartily. 'I love him, but I have brethren enough who are trying to climb with a foot on my neck.

I called you sister," he said. "Was I right?" "Yes," said Marthe. And hesitating: "What made you sure?" "The luggage of poetry you carry," said Francis Crawford; and far down in the tired eyes the smile lingered still. "Your other burdens I can also share.

Gardington was made over to me once, by the Crown. It's one of their standard good-conduct prizes for espionage.' Philippa said, rather blankly, 'I thought you were spying at that time for Scotland.' 'Well, I wasn't spying for England,' Lymond said.

But I am no godly man. I'm only a commander of some experience, who knows how to ask a tired army to throw its heart into a citadel and follow it. Forgive me.

You are a night-hunting sable, my Marthe, and your fur is soft, and your teeth are sharpened and wounding; but so are mine; so are mine.

You did not, I trust, persuade your eminent friend to forsake his bower in favour of these noisome marshes? That would indeed be a case of the punishment being born at the same time as the sin.

Does anyone know how many women he actually has in his tent?' 'I rather doubt,' said Lancelot Plummer a shade self-consciously, 'if he is at present dealing with women.' 'The last time I passed his tent,' said Alec Guthrie sourly, 'there was a camel in it.

She died, knowing your parentage?" Marthe shrugged. "The secret died with her. It would trouble her little. She had breathed life into her puppets: you and I to discover what in ourselves we still lacked. Philippa to be gilded as befitted her spirit. Jerott…to be taken from you. And my lover and I to be parted.

You promise food and horses and nonresistance and when they invade, you do or don't lick their boots according to the thickness of your walls and the kind of conscience you have.

I had a sense, I believe, of indebtedness. But someone trussed it in black felt and kicked it to death, as the Turks do.

That way, that sunlit, gentle path was set with mines, and had at the end of it a chasm she could not contemplate. So she hid her impulse, and did not know, because he was better at concealment than she, that he had noticed it.

A mind responsive to beauty is a storehouse with many rooms; words, sounds, textures, all the nobler exercises of the senses leave some image filed and folded to be summoned at need. There, too, the brutal images are kept: the sights and smells and hurts, real and imagined, which the responsive mind accepts and has bedded deep.

We've all those, and we've the rest, like yourself, who carry the throne on their backs from generation to generation—maybe just because you've so much at stake in Scotland that there's no other game worth the risk; still you do it.

Lymond said, very softly, in English, 'This is part of a plan to escape. Pretend to strike me, and listen.' 'You stinking catamite,' said Jerott; and with all his considerable strength launched a blow at Lymond's face which was very genuine indeed.

Meanwhile, battles are fought not by knights, as you well know, but by mercenaries. They are employed, as mastiffs are employed in the boar season, and victory goes to the deepest purse, while the people suffer the cost of them. That is war without pride ruled by chivalry, as the Master of Game rules the hunting field.

isn't it sometimes more expensive to accept favours than it is to buy them?" He

Lymond moved swiftly from Jerott's side to where the fine hair, curling like silk, lay on the Geomaler's arm; and bending his head, kissed the dead child, as he had not kissed the living, full on the mouth.

They expected to be fed; and Lady Buccleuch, for whom pregnancy spelled food, had already taken strategic foothold by the windows, where the cold dishes were ready laid.

For you are a leader—don't you know it? I don't, surely, need to tell you?—And that is what leadership means. It means fortifying the fainthearted and giving them the two sides of your tongue while you are at it. It means suffering weak love and schooling it till it matures. It means giving up your privacies, your follies and your leisure. It means you can love nothing and no one too much, or you are no longer a leader, you are the led.

Alec Guthrie's voice, serene from the shadows, said, You are not going to Russia. You are not going. All your life you have resented control and brooked no hint of instruction or guidance. This time, your will is not paramount.