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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| d4aa80c | Strophe and counterstrophe reached their epode. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| 991a5a7 | I regret Richard isn't with you. No matter. God hath a thousand handes to chastise and I have two--how can Richard escape us both? | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| d13e903 | 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. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| 6e9f11a | 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. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| 8ecbafb | It was your brother. He must be insane." "Not insane, dear." Sybilla, speaking gently, contradicted. "Not insane. But magnificently drunk, I fear." | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| af2b88f | 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. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| fdd3599 | A lie is a broad and spacious and glittering thing, sweeping belief before it from its very grandeur. But the truth fits, like an old man cutting cloth in an attic. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| 54f60a0 | It was to be expected that when he became in turn a leader of men, Francis should prove hard on others; should observe no laws; should fight, regardless of method, for victory. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| 7bed869 | Later, learning to know him, a friendship had grown: odd, irregular; at times surprisingly deep. And at times marred, it seemed wantonly, by Lymond's excesses and his own lack of trust towards Richard which again and again had caused his older brother anger and misery. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| 45e6b20 | She told me one night that she had no wish to go on living, and that if she did, it could only harm you. She was thirteen years old.... Can you not stand still, and look me in the face, and give me an answer? | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| 0014cad | If you are asking, did Eloise make no effort to avoid the explosion which killed her, the answer is probably yes. If you are also asking, was I her lover, the answer is no. After all,' said Lymond, 'that would be incest.' And with a click, the door closed finally after him. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| 4f4587a | His defences are good. But it is his friends that will bring him low, not his enemies, Lady Culter. Keep you out of his way. That's the best advice I can give you. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| 2b80eb7 | I don't bed with children.' 'Rumour says,' said Catherine d'Albon, 'that you did. Or are the Knights of St John all mistaken?' 'You know too much,' said Francis Crawford slowly. 'Shall I amend it? I don't bed with young girls who are virgins, unless they ask me, and unless I am married to them. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| 5371969 | She rose. 'You mean,' Catherine d'Albon said, 'I have agreed to marry a libertine?' 'Everyone marries libertines,' Lymond said comfortably, rising and taking her elbow. 'But not everyone knows it beforehand. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| 28b0a7e | There is a man in him that could support it,' Archie said. 'True enough. But it is maybe a man the world could do without. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| db2d6f5 | Your husband appears to possess an uncanny gift for seducing his enemies. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| fa24dae | said Lord Grey, adjusting his sight to the folded paper he had just raised from his desk, ' He looked up. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| 071bd85 | And, knowing their parentage now, you could see Sybilla in both her sons; but more clearly still, the legendary presence of the first baron Crawford of Culter: blurred through two generations in the square, brown-haired person of Richard; and undiluted in Francis, the love-child. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| 2380501 | You are the only person with a shaky interest in ethics and the emotional stability of a quince seed in a cup of lukewarm water..... | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| 940f0be | Jerott had no reason to challenge her wit. For a woman, it seemed to him at times excessive to tiresomeness. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| 13ec511 | You sit on trouble, don't you, until it blows up in your face? | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| 5de86d7 | It was the only field, so far, in which the Pearl of Fortune had shown any precocity, other than the feat of keeping her head, her reason and her sense of the ridiculous amid conditions of civilized lunacy. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| 420e2e8 | She had grown. Kate's vicious friend, once so elevated, was taller by little more than a head. She drew her brows together, and studied the circles under his eyes. He said lightly, 'My dear girl; it's Almoner's Saturday. With six frails of figs and a sackful of almonds, I am offering you my name.' Philippa's lips parted. The smith in her chest, changing a wooden mallet for a small charge of gunpowder, pulverized brain, lungs and stomach and.. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| b9553dd | She ought to be at home in Flaw Valleys, doing her morning exercise on the lute, at which, said her teacher, she would have had a distinguished future, had she not been born English. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| 63458fe | A trained fighting man, accustomed to hard words and hard blows and the company of men like himself, for years ruled by the self-discipline required by the world's greatest order of chivalry, Jerott had come to terms now with the fact that one man could make him feel and act like a rhinoceros in a cloud of mosquitoes. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| a2b2832 | Without thinking at all deeply about anything, he was chiefly aware of the need to be back in a company of men, fighting something. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| 0d4215d | I told her grace that he might not marry the girl if she lost the use of her limbs or her dowry; but I couldn't think of anything else that would deter him. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| e922a8b | With his education and heritage, Harry Darnley will be the only turncoat in England who can practise sodomy in Alcaic stanzas. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| bd490c6 | She may be hoping for Lug of the Long Arms but what she has is the family Crawford, qui peut de tous bois faire fleches in order to sit in the butts and shoot hearty rounds at each other. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| 2e32ccc | You wouldn't expect me to make social calls if you had the remotest idea of the work entailed in bringing two unfortunate persons to the altar.' Careless words. 'It takes ten minutes, in my experience,' Lymond said. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| 4ddae60 | The door opened. 'Hercules?' said Danny tremulously. 'Isosceles? The Triangle? The Angel Apostate? | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| 9015a02 | You lecture me, Mr Crawford?' 'I,' said the comte de Sevigny, 'am attempting to offer you foodstuffs. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| 1ea0757 | I am sad,' said the Bishop of Orkney to Lord James Stewart as the tables were gently drawn and the floor cleared and the candied ginger passed from place to place. 'I am sad because we live, you and I, on two sides of one river. And whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hart we both covet.' 'There is a remedy,' said the Queen's half-brother. 'Is there? I doubt it,' said Reid of Orkney. 'There might have been, in the past. But this hart is .. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| a80ed47 | I know,' said Danny Hislop. 'I want to see them being fond of one another. I want to see everybody brazening it out. And then I want to see what your petit Francois does to you when the party's over. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| 1561989 | Let us save everyone's faces,' Lymond said, 'while we can. And before Master Buchanan is hurled to the floor by either Nicolas or a thunderbolt from the late Copernicus. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| 15b0e17 | A great many inferior people, Mr Crawford, have helped you over the years in your well-publicized career of adversity, but you mustn't be surprised if the circle begins to diminish. To go by what happened this evening, the man who has finally emerged from it all isn't worth helping. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| d1afd90 | My dear man,' Philippa said. 'It seems to me that you have no spirit left but the spirit of resentment. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| 264f8eb | Scorpio,' Lymond said, 'does not caper. He stings. We are damned, as the man says, of nature: so conceaved and borne as a serpent is a serpent, and a tode a tode, and a snake a snake by nature ...' He looked at her again, a little wryly. 'And you, I suppose, are the Crab. It doesn't matter. If you want to bite, bite. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| 7af88d5 | I devised a somewhat arbitrary way out of my own difficulties that evening. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| 787e2d8 | You tried to ...? How?' 'In the time-honoured fashion,' he said. 'My cuffs are too tight to gratify you with a view. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| 3473b1d | Of course. You have always tried to escape.' 'And I have always harmed the friends who have tried to stop me,' Lymond said. His voice was uninflected. He added, 'I have tried many times to warn you not to come too close to me. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| f2d12d0 | Level-headed and constructive to the end,' Philippa said, 'in confronting all your personal problems. And now? A trifle of hemlock? | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| 776911c | And you can't adjust to bastardy?' He said evenly, 'Give me, perhaps, until tomorrow instead of today to achieve it. | Dorothy Dunnett | ||
| 7fc9f2d | You are proving, aren't you,' said Philippa contemptuously, 'that to be base-born makes you a fourth-rate son of a fourth-rate little country? | Dorothy Dunnett |