Quotes from Dorothy Dunnett

Chancellor said, 'She is concerned for your future.' 'She is concerned for her dog and her cat,' Lymond said. 'It is a Somerville failing.

Reindeer blew like leaves across the white, blinding bowl of the landscape. The eye read them as script on a book-roll: the stretched neck, the tined bones of the antlers, the powerful, thick-pelted body; the long slurring stride with its snapping click as the cloven hooves met.

They flew, hissing, through the surgical cold of the air, the scythed snow spinning like glass from the runners.

It had been a boy's trick, Jerott remembered. Standing bareback on your father's horses; somersaulting, chariot-riding. Francis, buried in books, had never publicly attempted it. What private practice, Jerott wondered fleetingly, had gone into that?

We've had a deal of bad poetry, haven't we? Suggesting the climax to this thrilling and literary spectacle. The Olla Podrida, my sweet-hearts, will now be set on the fire.

The door shut behind them all, and locked. The women stared at it, mesmerized, and observed across it the wavering shadow of an uncanny cloud. Behind the chamfered windows the sun was obscured by drifting wreaths of grey smoke, and the silence filled with the crackling of flames. The youngest surviving Crawford, in leaving, had deftly set fire to the castle.

For him, it was now of no importance, as his place in the world was of no consequence. He was home, after long and harsh buffeting. And it was she, who knew his quality as Grey had done, who had to live with the knowledge that there was no channel by which it could continue; that for the purposes of the present world the flourish, so brief, was now over with.

When a Venetian associates with a Genoese, it is not for the sake of amusement, I assure you.

It was your brother. He must be insane." "Not insane, dear." Sybilla, speaking gently, contradicted. "Not insane. But magnificently drunk, I fear.

Verily, God hath eighteen thousand worlds; and verily, your world is one of them, and this its bright axle-tree." The odd phrase stayed with Chancellor, through Pinega and beyond

Sometimes,' said Míkál, 'one must travel to find what is love.' 'Sometimes,' said Philippa stoutly, 'one must travel to find what is kindness. I know what is——I know what love is.

On such a night, no one spoke. The four sledges soared through horizonless space, wreathed above and below with vapours of light, shot with trembling colour. Above the fear and his aching body and the pain of the pure and terrible air in his lungs Diccon Chancellor dwelled, with his heart on his wife and his sons, and his soul in a limbo far farther than that, and experienced happiness.

You're indecent.' Tobie dragged down his shirt. 'It reflects my state of mind,' he said.

The knowledgeable gypsy eyes scanned the dairy-maid skin, the gilded hair, the long hands, jewelled to display their beauty while the Master, serenely smiling, returned the compliment under relaxed lids.

Courtenay matter. There must be letters. Many of them appear, as you know, to concern the problems of navigation in which he was interested, but it is not difficult to read behind the lines. He died in Padua, and from what I can learn, all his papers were sealed in a casket and locked up by the Bailiff for safety. Rumour has it that Peter Vannes the English Ambassador has been told to

Sables from Pechora, and white and dun fox, and the pelts of white wolves, and bearskins. From Siberia, red and black fox and the white fur of squirrels. Lynx and ermine. Wolverine, marten and beaver. What once lived and breathed and hunted through forest and snowfield piled now in stalls, fifty small skins between boards, sold as a timber.

Khátún, what is his face?' 'A lemon?' said Philippa.

For how long can one maintain total vigilance? For how long can love last, in isolation, without sinking crushed beneath its own pressure?

What he wanted was very near. It was typical of the monstrous, egregious, laughable irony which dominated his life that with every dragging lift of his arms, he should be saying over and over, 'Not yet.'

A queen does not need to be crowned,' said Güzel, 'in order to rule.

Kate approved of the child's father, and so did she. Kate all her life had championed the underdog, and so therefore did she. And what more oppressed puppy in all the world was she likely to find than this one?

The alternative is English force: reprisals and raids and counter-raids and broken promises, as you say. Of course you must try to secure this alliance. You might have achieved it in the last reign but for Henry. It was he who fostered the cult of the honest emotion, and you're still paying for the mistake.

Friendship with his fellow religious had caused him to neaten his clothes and reduce his tattered black hair to something more seemly, although he still moved more like a man of his fists than a man of the Church, and his greatest battle, still, was the one to disguise his natural temper.

Infant, I can't resist it. I'm going to put you to the proof; and if you impress us with your worth, then quicquid libet, licet; as was remarked on another, unsavoury occasion. Are you willing to be wooed, sweet Marigold?