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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 7d8db90 | I don't like to see things done badly on either. At the moment, I am tired of journeys. It is time I arrived somewhere. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| 28a729c | And Richard was silent, for the truth Jerott had seen touched him, too, for a moment before he thrust it aside. He said, instead, 'Once, I returned, by mistake, a present you gave me.' As when he had come in, fresh from the wind, surprise and pleasure roused, for an instant, all the colour in his brother's face. Francis Crawford said, 'I have kept it, in case one day you might want it. If you do ... It makes worthwhile this part, at least, .. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| 550bd0d | Oh, Christ, Richard,' Lymond said. 'You don't need to remind me what country I belong to. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| c8e5ca0 | I have been told to live in Scotland, and I shall do it, but I doubt if it will be to Scotland's benefit. There are handicaps, I have found, more crippling than blindness. Even the part of me that did not come back from Dourlans would hardly have made you a whole man. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| 379c446 | In Francis, there was so much that was admirable; and the flaws were so great. Yet one forgot them. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| a720121 | Have you not realized yet that he regards you as a man of that stamp? You are his holy war, Francis.' 'And yours?' he said. He could see, in the swimming heat of the fire, that she was smiling. 'Just war,' she said. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| b2ed696 | You will stand there and let me refer to Madame la putaine your mother? You will watch while I call my sergeant in to listen while I brand you bastard?' 'No,' said Lymond. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| 0870e7b | He did not want to live. As the condition of life does, so the condition of death should depend on one's choice. The wise man lives as long as he ought, not as long as he can. Democrites fell on his sword; Aruntius killed himself to fly both the past and the future; Crates said that love would be cured by hunger, if not by time; and whoever disliked these two remedies, by a rope. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| 8701b95 | All these were barred to him because of the vow he had made to Sybilla. Because of it, he could not resign himself to what, easy or difficult, was coming; but instead had to turn again to his lessons: the long, bitter schooling thrust at him, for no purpose, throughout every twist of his lifespan. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| eccfcf4 | There is a new game about to begin. Will you leave it to others?' 'As you will leave it to your son,' said Francis Crawford. 'It is all I find I can do. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| d6535bf | Boy,' he said. 'Listen to me, and learn the first lesson of man, the political animal. When you wage war, you wage it for ever. When war is over, it has never existed. There is a truce, and there will shortly be a peace between England and Scotland. Crawford of Lymond is the Queen's friend, and my friend, and your friend. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| 186a71c | But I,' said Lymond, 'am one of the new apostles, seeking nothing but voluptuousness and human pleasures, and abusing the world.... | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| 0ee67f4 | And so the amber hair of Francis Crawford's father, which all his life had marked him out: for hurt, for passion; for treachery; performed its last destined office in the sunshine and fresh winds of England that morning. A single rider, a sober doublet and cloak might have escaped notice. But not the bare, golden head. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| 9ea88b4 | At pointblank range, there was no possibility of missing. He aimed into the fair, weary, rancourless face, and then at the heart, and both balls found their mark and brought death in the end, not with the sweet ambiguity of an arrow but with the finality which frees the earth at once of body and soul, and all that was good or bad in either. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| b4eb673 | That made Richard leave her, to walk back over the hill. After a moment Jerott rose and walked back also, to meet Adam and Kate and say what had to be said to Sybilla. That now she had one son only living. That Francis, the best loved of the three, had now left her. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| 397bfb5 | Someone sobbed. Someone said, | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| 7070905 | He lived in her, his disciple. For her to think, now, as he would have done. And to act always thereafter. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| 3f208bd | For him, the gateway had opened, and the loss was hers to bear: that at least she could do, and honour his teaching. She could remember what he was and what had died with him: all the virtues and vices of Scorpio: And that other he had: a capacity for human love so great that its denial in Sybilla had changed his life; and its power, once unleashed for herself, had been more than he could manage. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| 30962b6 | Men throughout Scotland and over the narrow seas who lived different lives because they had known him. To carry his bright legacy into the future, he did not require to have children. No one, once they had met him, could remain the same. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| cfdfbf3 | My beloved is dead. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| 9bce5a8 | And then the blue eyes, with gentleness, scanned all her new-made body and came to rest on her eyes. 'I have begun to eat,' said Francis Crawford. 'And I have begun to slake my thirst. But in you I have found a banquet under the heavens that will serve me for ever. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| 5716c14 | Do you regret it?' said Sybilla. 'I would have kept it for you if I could. I did not know, you see, what you were to be. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| 168424c | My dear, there is no blame, where there lives a passion like that: do we not know it? Rest at peace. We are your children; and we love you. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| d1f749b | Do you think he will notice?' Danny said. 'I sometimes feel if I placed myself nude on the floor between the Voevoda and one of his meetings, he wouldn't even walk round me. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| 817a7cf | Adam!' said Danny. 'You mustn't drop out of the choir. We have too much to do. What we have to do? | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| f8c9b97 | You will have power and wealth, but what are these to a scholar? You will end your life an oasis in a desert of ignorance. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| d02d897 | Gorgeous I called him and that he is, Maeve: you'd be surprised. And nasty I called him, and that, Maeve, was a shrewd piece of insight, for nasty he certainly is. And a clever bastard, I called him.... Not to his face, dear. We're not all born to be heroes. But what he may not know, Maeve, is that I'm a clever bastard as well. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| 219cb85 | She looked,' said Alec Guthrie dryly, 'like a clever woman who was not unaware that five ill-dressed passers-by were displaying an unhealthy interest in her personal life. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| f69dc3f | I do not ask,' said Dee. 'You note I do not ask--but I would swear, by all I have learned, that you are Scorpio.' 'With the sting in the tail?' Lymond said. 'You are probably right. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| 0b068cb | We may lack some polish,' he said. 'But distrust the society which displays overmuch dangerous charm. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| ac35fd5 | It was to be a long, newsy letter, effective in spelling and conveying inexplicitly in its latter pages an explicit injunction from his mother to come home at once. The fact that Francis Crawford's mother had made no such request and before she did so would bleed in her coffin like pie-meat was a matter of minor importance. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| aa8fc59 | I'm tired of training,' Danny complained. 'Couldn't we plunder something, such as decadent idols with emerald eyes and a lot of clean, unspoiled village maidens? | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| 44bcc14 | 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. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| a44524b | 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. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| 7a06c40 | You are not coming.' 'But----' said Christopher. 'You heard your father,' said Killingworth. 'You can't hold enough liquor.' 'Can you?' said Christopher, goaded. 'No,' said George Killingworth, after a moment's reflection. 'But who else is going to help us to bed? | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| 9a345d8 | 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. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| d7667bf | If I am dead I cannot sponsor your travels. Except, clearly, in a direction you will never be called on to follow. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| 6aa40a4 | 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. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| cf65a02 | I hope never to have to do that to you again. I hope one day you will forgive me. Try to remember, just at this moment, that my trade calls for acting. Try to remember, Richard, as I have told you, that because of your own honesty I can't confide in you. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| f4e414d | I do not know whether this man is a traitor or not, but he is an individualist, and in war the two are the same. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| 6129aa6 | If you had asked me, I could have told you, without putting yourself to the trouble of experiment, that no one, saint or sinner, is likely to seduce Francis against his will. Unfortunately. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| 44c5a10 | The carrying voice of Alec Guthrie said unexpectedly, 'But as Sir Graham has already pointed out, every practising Christian must serve two masters.' 'My God ... I know it,' said Lymond. 'My nerves are on edge like a Dublin butcher over the conversation as it is. The situation is that Sir Graham's other Master and I are in perfect accord; whereas, being human, I am not convinced that Sir Graham and I should necessarily be. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| ee4aa2b | Men fall short of your desire, and so you abandon men. The Crown falls short of your expectations, and you abandon the Crown. A leader with no following is an aerolite unloosed, M. Crawford, its power blinding and blistering where it wantonly falls, until it burns itself out. To take a puny man and make him great is your gift. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| 10e1da1 | You did not expect human values from a machine. You did not grow angry with a machine, or be disappointed or feel betrayed by it. You treated it with detachment and curiosity, as you would any soul-deprived object, and if it kicked you in the teeth, you side-stepped and kicked it back, harder. | Dorothy Dunnett |