Quotes About Legacy

For Arthur, at last, had come.

If the Danes come, he spoke to Wulfhere, you must let me fight. You don't know how to fight. Then you must teach me. He slid Serpent-Breath back into the scabbard. Wessex needs a king who can fight, he said, instead of pray.

What binds a man to his land? What power within allows him to give his life to preserve his land and the lives of the families who work it? It can only be love.

the land Ida's warriors had conquered was now our land. Ida the Flamebearer's enemies had been driven from their pastures and valleys, hunted to Wales, to Scotland, or to Cornwalum, and the land they left behind was now ours, the land we wanted one day to be called Englaland.

He believed that virtues are handed down through a man's loins! What nonsense! A

Men and women used pliers to pull teeth from the dead and, for years after, false teeth were known as Waterloo Teeth. Some

Men weeping because they had met the horror, and it was us. We were the wolf pack of Bebbanburg and we had taken back what Ida the Flamebearer had first won.

Did I know all that at eleven? Some, I think. It lay in my heart, unformed, unspoken, but hard as a stone. It would be covered over in time, half forgotten and often contradicted, but it was always there. Destiny is all, Ravn liked to tell me, destiny is everything. He would even say it in English, "Wyrd bi ful aræd.

man. We make much in this life if we are able. We make children and wealth and amass land and build halls and assemble armies and give great feasts, but only one thing survives us. Reputation. I

And Wessex was the last kingdom of England.

The sun shone on us, the water sparkled, the oar-blades dipped and we were gone. Gone to make history.

It never occurred to me that they might not accept it, yet looking back I am astonished that the battle of Cynuit was fought according to the idea of a twenty-year-old who had never stood in a slaughter wall. Yet I was tall, I was a lord, I had grown up among warriors, and I had the arrogant confidence of a man born to battle. I am Uhtred, son of Uhtred, son of another Uhtred, and we had not held Bebbanburg and its lands by whimpering at altars. We are warriors.

all the Danish leaders, had carved into our shield wall with his great war ax, I had faced him, beaten him, and sent him to join the einherjar, that army of the dead who feast and swive in Odin's corpse hall. What

She was a widow now, but she still ruled Ragnar's great fortress of Dunholm, which, after Bebbanburg, was the most formidable stronghold in Northumbria.

houses. I remember the first time I ever climbed a Roman staircase, and how odd it felt, and I knew that in times gone by men must have taken such things for granted. Now the world was dung and straw and damp-ridden wood. We had stone masons, of course, but it was quicker to build from wood, and the wood rotted, but no one seemed to care. The whole

But Alfred could not live long. He was already an old man, well past forty years, and now he was looking to the future. He

much followed from that hurried ceremony in the flower-speckled clearing beside the stream. So many died. There was so much heartache, so much blood and so many tears that they would have made a great river; yet, in time, the eddies smoothed, new rivers joined, and the tears went down to the great wide sea and some people forgot how it ever began. The time of glory did come, yet what might have been never did, and of all those who were hurt by that moment in the sun, Arthur was hurt the most.

Le storie ci accompagneranno finchè esisterà l'uomo. Lo si capisce, in parte, dall'effetto che hanno sui bambini. Grazie alle storie i bambini capiscono che il mistero non li ucciderà. Grazie alle storie scoprono di avere un futuro.

The shapes of houses, sometimes transmitted through a hundred generations, seem eternally valid.

For now you have only Mahomet and his dupes, and the Maid and her dupes; but what will it be when every girl thinks herself a Joan and every man a Mahomet?

La vie de l'homme, avec tous ses projets, s'élève comme une petite tour dont la mort est le couronnement.

To leave a whisper of myself in the world, my ghost, a magna opera of words.

No true warrior should die in his bed.

It is as if people refused to leave their dead alone, forced them back into the light, made them keep their composure even in death.