Bernard Cornwell Quotes

So we rode through a broken gate in a broken wall into a broken town, and it was dusk, and the day's...

Serpent-Breath was famous...Wasp-Sting, short and lethal.

Some had hurled spears first. Those spears thumped into our shields, making them unwieldy, but it ha...

Together we would make reputation, we would have men in halls across Britain telling the story of ou...

...victory does not come to men who listen to their fears.

We all suffer from dreams.

Is all ordained? Foreknowledge is not fate, and we may choose our paths, yet fate says we may not ch...

But we do not choose our deaths. The Norns do that at the foot of Yggdrasil and I imagined one of th...

Lord Derfel, you do insult a man so very easily. What was it to be? My head in a pit dunged by slave...

But when you have order, you don't need Gods. When everything is well ordered and disciplined then n...

The wheel of fortune that had once raised her so high had taken her into the utter depths.

He had always thought there was an answer to all life's mysteries in the stars, yet whenever he star...

A sad, plangent music. In the British camp, Sharpe thought, they would be singing, but no one was si...

Love is a dangerous thing. It comes in disguise to change our life... Lust is the deceiver. Lust wre...

Father Hobbe, his cassock skirts hitched up to his waist, was fighting with a quarterstaff, ramming ...

An English man-at-arms had his helmet split open and his skull with it, so that he rode wavering fro...

He sounded pathetic and he knew it, but he had been driven to this humiliation by love. A woman can ...

Oh the madness of battle! We fear it, we celebrate it, the poets sing of it, and when it fills the b...

The bards sing of love, they celebrate slaughter, they extol kings and flatter queens, but were I a ...

I am not sure,' Mordecai told Thomas, 'whether omens can be trusted.''Of course they can.''I should ...

I would hear him screaming, I would watch him bleed, I would tear his flesh piece by piece before I ...

If they saw men swarming up the wall, if they saw the axes chopping at our shields on the wall’s top...

An enemy sees his attackers laughing? It is better than all the insults. A man who laughs as he goes...

When a man cannot fight he would curse. The gods like to feel needed.

It's better to make the wrong choice," my father had continued, "than to make no choice at all.

So a good man can be a bad Christian?""I suppose so.""Then a bad man," I said, "can be a good Christ...

Folk tell their children that success lies in working hard and being thrifty, but that is as much no...

That joy. That madness. The gods must feel this way every moment of every day. It is as if the world...

I decided to start a war, father", I said, cheerfully, "it's so much more interesting than peace.

You'll call me a damned Jew, a Christ murderer, a secret worshipper of pigs and a kidnapper of chris...

Writing is a solitary occupation.

What I mean by that is that the point of life, as I see it, is not to write books or scale mountains...

Don't tell me the moon is shining, show me the glint of light on broken glass.

Men do not relish the shield wall. They do not rush to death's embrace. You look ahead and see the o...

Nor did he care about his childhood, for certainly I never heard him speak of it. I once questioned ...

The sword was called Kaledvoulc'h, which means hard lightning, though Igraine prefers to call it Exc...

Poor Uther. He believed that virtues are handed down through a man's loins! What nonsense! A child i...

But fate, as Merlin always taught us, is inexorable. Life is a jest of the Gods, Merlin liked to cla...

This isn't just a war over land, it's a war about God. And Alfred...is Christ's servant...

And I looked,' Pyrlig said to me, 'and I saw a pale horse, and the rider's name was death.' I just s...

The preachers tell us that pride is a great sin, but the preachers are wrong. Pride makes a man, it ...

The war was between the Danes and Wessex. My war was with Odda the Younger, and I knew I was driven ...

Thirty paces, twenty, and you can see the eyes of the men who will try to kill you, and see the spea...

I have learned that it is one thing to kill in battle, to send a brave man's soul to the corpse hall...

Gods fight, Ragnar went on earnestly, and some win, some lose. The Christian god is losing. Otherwis...

The shield wall reeks of shit, and all a man wants is to be home, to be anywhere but on this field t...

Prisoners!" Finan shouted, and I suspected he was shouting at me because I had so blatantly ignored ...

I remember laughing at that moment, and I remember my son frowning at me in puzzlement. What I remem...

We should know who they are," I said, "before we kill them. That's just being polite.

Do you ever read the scriptures?""Every day," I said enthusiastically, "not a moment passes that I d...

It will never end.Till the world ends in the chaos of Ragnarok, we will fight for our women, for our...

All you need to know, boy," Finan growled, "is that Lord Uhtred's side is the one that wins.

He has a mouth, lord," Gerbruht said."I envy him," I said."Envy him, lord?""Most of us have to lower...

You will not say how you are haunted by the faces of the men you killed, how in their last gasp of l...

I forget your name," I said."Most people spew shit from their arse," he retorted, "you manage it wit...