Dorothy Dunnett quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Dorothy Dunnett

Dorothy Dunnett Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Dorothy Dunnett on Wise Famous Quotes.

A long time afterwards, she was to remember what an excellent chess-player Francis Crawford was.

Adam!' said Danny. 'You mustn't drop out of the choir. We have too much to do. What do we have to do?

Not to every young girl is it given to enter the harem of the Sultan of Turkey and return to her homeland a virgin.

He regards boredom, I observe, as the One and Mighty Enemy of his soul. And will succeed in conquering it, I am sure - if he survives the experience.

A versatile commodity, death; except for those suffering it.

Repressively, Lymond himself answered. "I dislike being discussed as if I were a disease. Nobody 'got' me," he said.

We may lack some polish,' he said. 'But distrust the society which displays overmuch dangerous charm.

I had no expectations,' Philippa said. The tears stood still on her face. 'This is one lesson I know by heart already.

I would give you my soul in a blackberry pie; and a knife to cut it with.

What I desire, thou dost not possess for thyself. How canst thou render it then to another?

Verily, God hath eighteen thousand worlds; and verily, your world is one of them, and this its bright axle-tree.

Where are the links of the chain ... joining us to the past?

Strophe and counterstrophe reached their epode.

I dislike untidy wars, as I dislike untidy peacemaking.

They spoke in Latin, so that all might understand; but the quotations they flung at each other were Greek and Hebrew, Turkish, Persian.

And that was when she realized that laughter, which they had lost, had come back to them, and they were whole again.

I despised men who accepted their fate. I shaped mine twenty times and had it broken twenty times in my hands.

The crossroads may not be of your own seeking, but at least the road you choose will be your own.

A man of over thirty might be held to be at the height of his powers, but not necessarily of his wisdom.

Kate won't be troubled. I don't know any gentlemen, anyway.'

'Thank you,' said Lymond.

I could see you drop dead this minute from paralysis of the brain cells and burst into uninhibited applause.

I devised a somewhat arbitrary way out of my own difficulties that evening.

Men would fight well for their pay, but they would die for an aspiration.

What an extraordinary fuss there has been,' said the Dame de Doubtance raspingly, 'about that irresponsible Irishwoman and her improper child.

Immoderation, Mariotta, is a thief of money and intestinal joy, but who'd check it? Not I. Here I am, weeping soft tears of myrrh, to prove it.

What is there but untruth and heartbreak wherever you go?

The darts which make me suffer are my own.

Violence in nature is one thing, but among civilized mankind, what excuse is there?

Lymond surveyed the grinning audience with an air of gentle discovery. Is there no work to be done? Or perhaps it's a holiday?

We're all runts and bastards of one sort or another.

Lymond said, 'Have I been talking?'

'We all have, in nightmares. But yours have not been about the sea.

I wish,' said Lymond, 'it would try a major key sometimes.'

'Wind,' Chancellor said, 'is a melancholy creature.

She wouldn't send anyone, nor would she take anyone with her. She organizes witches' Sabbaths every full moon,' explained Philippa tartly.

Warfare and trickery. It is your natural element.

You've got one hero too many already. Stand on your own feet, Brother. It's good for the soul.

Mariotta listened to it all, sitting judicially in a whirl of velvet with all
the Culter jewels and the emerald necklace for moral support.

One escapes; but one always has to come back. I found too I disliked not being in command of myself.

Rimed and sparkling with sugar, the wrestler lay like some child's flaccid sweetmeat in death, and the dogs licked his eyelids.

Whether romance existed in him or not, sentimentality had no place at all.

Intentions, yours or anyone else's, don't matter; they never matter and never excuse.

And deep within him, missing its accustomed tread, his heart paused, and gave one single stroke, as if on an anvil.

Music, the knife without a hilt,

In order to rule, one must face reality.

Discomfort without hope of betterment is not a great springboard.

We?' said Chancellor.

'I am lavishly paid,' Danny said, 'to think in the first person plural.

This is habitual. Mother flutters her wings, and every institution within sight tumbles flat.

As everyone keeps insisting, parentage doesn't matter. Love him for what he is.

Fools make news, and wise men carry it.

Subject to intelligence, nothing is incalculable.

I hope the string and clapper arrangement he calls a mind has been permanently put out of action.

For this, you are right, I need to be either entirely sober or very drunk indeed.

I have many fears,' Lymond said. 'But death is not one of them.

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.

You choose to play God, and the Deity points out that the post is already adequately filled.

It is not advisable to crow. It might be oneself next time.

The more modest your expectations, the less often you will court disappointment.

Don't be so sensitive,' he said, faintly chiding. 'It makes everyday commerce most trying.

I wish to God," said Gideon with mild exasperation, "that you'd talk - just once - in prose like other people.

Go away and bleed to death,' said his onetime saviour sharply. 'On behalf of the female sex I feel I may cheer every lesion.

Words is but wind but dunts is the devil

The moment is past. The chessboard has gone; and the people. You must let me take the room from you too.

I have fallen out of the habit of talking to brothers,' Lymond said.

It was one of the occasions when Lymond asleep wrecked the peace of mind of more people than Lymond awake.

If I can't be personal, I don't want to argue," said his hostess categorically. "I may be missing your points, but you're much too busy dodging mine.

Lion-hearted; her tremors braced with virtue, Philippa trotted on.

I do admire efficiency,' said Marthe. 'But how tedious it can be in excess.

In Rome there is a pathological shortage of small coins. For change, the little shops tend to use candy.

Self-knowledge is not sold on the Rialto. And if it were, few people would buy.

I see,' said Jerott slowly. 'You've thought it all out.'

'That's what I do,' said Lymond. 'I sit on my brood-patch and think.

I prize freedom of the mind above freedom of the body.

Intolerance drunk is bad enough, but intolerance sober is quite insupportable.

If I did not know how to live, I shall know how to die.

It was a tragic and annihilating war, in which intellect fought naked with intellect, and the blows fell not upon the mind but upon the soul.

If he is tired, and they put a foot wrong, he will choose the one unmentionable response and make it. He did it last night.

Facts are the soil from which the story grows. Imagination is a last resort.

Lymond's behaviour, as always, went to the limits of polite usage and then hurtled off into space.

I have lost you before I have found you.

Habits are the ruin of ambition, of initiative, of imagination.

The trouble with Austin was that he believed so deeply in the chivalrous virtues that he found it impossible to refer to them.

Henry of England had all the virtues and all the faults, and solved the contradiction by making scapegoats and sin-eaters of half his entourage.

Look up ... and see them.
The teaching stars,
beyond worship
and commonplace tongues.

And isna Sybilla a wee love o' a bitch?'

'You say the nicest things about my mother,' said Lymond.

Elephants gave you less bother, any day.

I once heard a man speak, who had understanding, and the promise of vision. He was called the Master of Culter.

Acrostics in French or acrostics in Hebrew were still Greek to him.

I feel I deserve a little amusement at someone else's expense. That is all. I have worked for it. I have paid for it. And I propose to have it.

He has to perfection, M. le Comte, the art of living his private life with as much public attention as possible.

I will give you to Catherine. I will not give you to a hole in the ground.

One knows, when all one's life one has walked in dangerous places, when the silence is that of ambush and when the silence is that of emptiness.

And, surprisingly, it was Lymond's voice which said sharply, 'You cannot debar a human being from love!

A smile, bracketing his still mouth, spread like bane over Lymond's pale face.

Lack of genius never held anyone back. Only time wasted on resentment and daydreaming can do that.

Without thinking at all deeply about anything, he was chiefly aware of the need to be back in a company of men, fighting something.

He is not going to come back now, for me, for you or for anyone. This time he has found the boatman, and the boatman has taken him over.

We have reached the open sea, with some charts; and the firmament.

man had blandly abstained. He had been right: it would have lost him money. But not in Scotland,

The war between England and Scotland was in its eighth year and there had been no raid for ten days: it had seemed possible to get married in peace.

For how long can one maintain total vigilance?

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

I have learned,' said Lymond, 'that kindness without love is no kindness.

Tact,' Lymond said, 'is the name you should have upon your tombstone.