Top 100 Bernard Cornwell Quotes
#1. And yes, there's a simplicity to writing books because you're not a member of a team, so you make all the decisions yourself instead of deferring to a committee.
Bernard Cornwell
#2. Children born to unwed mothers,' he said after a long silence, 'have parts of their souls missing.
Bernard Cornwell
#3. Start your killers young, before their consciences are grown. Start them young and they will be lethal.
Bernard Cornwell
#4. The crews of the Viking ships are Danish, Norse, Frisian, and Saxon.
Bernard Cornwell
#5. And you look bloody young to be a sergeant"
"I was born late, sir
Bernard Cornwell
#6. His charms worked, for though the bullets flicked close none hit him. He was the tiger of Mysore, he could not die, only kill.
Bernard Cornwell
#7. A trial relied heavily on oaths, but both sides would bring as many liars as they could muster, and judgment usually went to the better liars or, if both sides were equally convincing, to the side who had the sympathy of the onlookers.
Bernard Cornwell
#8. So the books have a greater appeal to a British audience, but that hasn't stopped them making best-seller lists in places like Brazil, Japan and at least a dozen other countries.
Bernard Cornwell
#11. Laughter in battle. That was what Ragnar had taught me, to take joy from the fight.
Bernard Cornwell
#12. Because there could not be peace, not while two tribes shared one land. One tribe must win. Even the nailed god cannot change that truth. And I was a warrior, and in a world at war the warrior must be cruel.
Bernard Cornwell
#13. Some mothers soften their sons, but Osbert was motherless and I had raised him hard because a man must be hard. The world is filled with enemies.
Bernard Cornwell
#14. When a man must choose between nothing and everything he has small choice.
Bernard Cornwell
#15. Someone wise, I forget who, said we must leave our children to fate.
Bernard Cornwell
#16. If the leader is a good man he will be liked and if he's not, he won't, and if he is a good man and a bad leader then he is better off dead.
Bernard Cornwell
#17. I was hated, and I knew it. Part of it was my fault, I am arrogant.
Bernard Cornwell
#18. Why did I choose to fight him? He was going to die whether I fought him or not, and he was dangerous, half my age and a warrior. But it is reputation, always reputation. Pride, I suppose, is the most treacherous of virtues.
Bernard Cornwell
#19. You can't live somewhere," he told me, "if the people don't want you to be there. They can kill our cattle or poison our streams, and we would never know who did it. You either slaughter them all or learn to live with them.
Bernard Cornwell
#20. Is all ordained? Foreknowledge is not fate, and we may choose our paths, yet fate says we may not choose them. So if fate is real, do we have a choice?
Bernard Cornwell
#21. The rules were simple: trust no one, be ever watchful and if trouble came hit first and hit hard. It had worked for him so far.
Bernard Cornwell
#22. Tomorrow," he shouted, "you do not fight for me! I fight for you! I fight for Wessex! I fight for your wives, for your children and your homes! Tomorrow we fight and, I swear to you on my father's grave and on my children's lives, tomorrow we shall win!
Bernard Cornwell
#23. So sanity is not a requisite of soldiering,' Wellesley said quietly.
Bernard Cornwell
#25. Well damn him. I was not dead yet, and so long as I lived I would fight for Aethelflaed.
Bernard Cornwell
#26. The Lord Uhtred sought to annoy you, bishop," the king said, "and it is best not to give him the satisfaction of showing that he has succeeded.
Bernard Cornwell
#27. St George!' the English shouted, but the saint must have been sleeping for he gave the attackers no help.
Bernard Cornwell
#28. This time, if God wills it, we shall replace him. A man bitten by a snake once does not let the snake live a second time.
Bernard Cornwell
#29. And I looked,' Pyrlig said to me, 'and I saw a pale horse, and the rider's name was death.' I just stared in amazement. 'It's in the gospel book,' he explained sheepishly, 'and it just cam to mind.
Bernard Cornwell
#30. You're the son of a king,' I told him, 'and one day you might be a king yourself. Life and death will be your gifts, so learn how to give them, boy.
Bernard Cornwell
#31. He sang the song of the sword, keening as he fed his blade, and Rollo, standing thigh-deep in the creek, ax swinging in murderous blows, blocked the enemy's escape. The Frisians, transported from confidence to bowel-loosening fear, began to drop their weapons.
Bernard Cornwell
#32. When those blades cut, they cause tears that feed the well of Urdr that lies beside the world tree, and the well gives the water that keeps Yggdrasil alive, and if Yggdrasil dies then the world dies, and so the well must be kept filled and for that there must be tears.
Bernard Cornwell
#33. They smile and sing their psalms and preach that their creed is all about love, but tell them you believe in a different god and suddenly it's all spittle and spite.
Bernard Cornwell
#35. had given an oath and honor binds us to paths we might not choose.
Bernard Cornwell
#36. Men fear wanderers for they have no rules. The Danes came as strangers, rootless and violent, and that, I thought, was why I was always happier in their company.
Bernard Cornwell
#37. 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.
Bernard Cornwell
#38. Were the Romans Christians?" I asked him, remembering my curiosity at the Roman farm. "Not always," Ravn said. "They had their own gods once, but they gave them up to become Christians and after that they knew nothing but defeat.
Bernard Cornwell
#39. I am old now. So old. My sight fades, my muscles are weak, my piss dribbles, my bones ache, and I sit in the sun and fall asleep to wake tired.
Bernard Cornwell
#40. Doubtless there were insanely frenzied warriors, but there is no evidence that lunatic nudists made regular appearances on the battlefield.
Bernard Cornwell
#42. He grinned at Sharpe. "Christ, but this is joy! What would we do for happiness if peace came?" He turned his horse clumsily, rammed his heels back, and whooped as the horse took off. "Let's go get the whores!
Bernard Cornwell
#43. She is a woman, and what women want, they get, and if the world and all it holds must be broken in the getting, then so be it.
Bernard Cornwell
#44. I could imagine Cnut sitting there and thinking that I must join him soon, and we would raise a horn of ale together. There is no pain in Valhalla, no sadness, no tears, no broken oaths.
Bernard Cornwell
#45. I gazed at the far woods and knew our enemies were also sharpening their blades. They had to be confident. They knew the dawn would bring them a battle, victory, plunder, and reputation.
Bernard Cornwell
#46. and Ravn recited a long poem about some ancient hero who killed a monster and then the monster's mother who was even more fearsome than her son, but I was too drunk to remember much of it. And
Bernard Cornwell
#47. I don't care if he's got a tail and tits, just take me to him." The
Bernard Cornwell
#48. I'm not his man, Father. I'm Uhtred of Bebbanburg, and the lords of Bebbanburg don't marry pious maggotfaced bitches of low birth.
Bernard Cornwell
#49. We live in a world where the strongest win, and the strongest must expect to be disliked.
Bernard Cornwell
#50. When a man cannot fight he would curse. The gods like to feel needed.
Bernard Cornwell
#51. We should know who they are," I said, "before we kill them. That's just being polite.
Bernard Cornwell
#52. I liked those tales. They were better than my stepmother's stories of Cuthbert's miracles. Christians, it seemed to me, were forever weeping and I did not think Woden's worshippers cried much.
Bernard Cornwell
#54. He liked to see men cowed and frightened, for that made them biddable, and Sergeant Hakeswill was always at his happiest when he was in control of unhappy men.
Bernard Cornwell
#56. The rest merely requires common sense; it is like a boxing match, the more you punch the better it is.
Bernard Cornwell
#57. My son smiled. "You taught me well, Father."
"What did I teach you?"
"That a spear-point in a prisoner's liver is a very persuasive thing.
Bernard Cornwell
#58. Now, waving flies from his face, he told the two deserters what they might expect.
Bernard Cornwell
#60. The people follow him."
"Because they have no choice. They follow, but do they love him?"
"Some do," Appah Rao answered. "But what does it matter? Why should a ruler want his people's love? Their obedience, yes, but love? Love is for children, McCandless, and for gods and for women.
Bernard Cornwell
#61. I would hear him screaming, I would watch him bleed, I would tear his flesh piece by piece before I would worry about Aethelflaed. This was family. This was revenge.
Bernard Cornwell
#62. You do not swing in a shield wall, you stab. May the gods ever send me enemies who swing their blades.
Bernard Cornwell
#63. It was funny, Richard Sharpe thought, that there were no vultures in England.
Bernard Cornwell
#64. An arena where, so Merewalh's priest told me, Christians had been fed to wild beasts. Some things are just too good to be true and so I was not sure I believed him.
Bernard Cornwell
#65. The Gods play games with us, but if we open ourselves then we can become a part of the game instead of its victims.
Bernard Cornwell
#67. I ain't seen a herd the size of it, not even when the Scots drive the beeves down from Scotland to London.
Bernard Cornwell
#68. Lawford shrugged. "She jilted you."
"Easy come, easy go," Sharpe said, then belted the tunic.
Bernard Cornwell
#69. The church, we're to meet in the church. Do try to wipe that blood off your mail, Uhtred. We're an embassy!
Bernard Cornwell
#70. There's war between the gods, Uhtred, war between the Christian god and our gods, and when there is war in Asgard the gods make us fight for them on earth.
Bernard Cornwell
#71. Liberty! Man has no liberty except the liberty to obey rules, but who makes the rules? With luck, Kate, it will be reasonable men making reasonable rules.
Bernard Cornwell
#72. Night was falling across the trampled rye. Nine thousand men had been killed or wounded in the fight for the crossroads,
Bernard Cornwell
#74. There is such joy in chaos. Stow all the world's evils behind a door and tell men that they must never, ever, open the door, and it will be opened because there is pure joy in destruction.
Bernard Cornwell
#75. Book tours and research provide a lot of travel - too much, I sometimes think, but we do take vacations.
Bernard Cornwell
#76. When you are up to your arse in shit there is only one thing to do. Attack.
Bernard Cornwell
#77. Words are like breath," she said, "you say them and they're gone. But writing traps them.
Bernard Cornwell
#78. If we do nothing then Wessex will spread like a plague. There'll be priests everywhere. We seek the future. We stare into its fog and hope to see a landmark that will make sense of fate.
Bernard Cornwell
#79. It's fun. I sit down every day and tell stories. Some folk would kill to get that chance.
Bernard Cornwell
#80. He thinks with his heart, Uhtred,' Alfred said, 'not his head. You can change a man's heart, but not his head.
Bernard Cornwell
#81. I sometimes think,' Merlin said when no more suggestions were offered, 'that I am doomed to live among idiots.
Bernard Cornwell
#82. We were three ships in a summer's dawn, and we were going to battle.
Bernard Cornwell
#83. A leader leads," Ragnar said, "and you can't ask men to risk death if you're not willing to risk it yourself.
Bernard Cornwell
#84. I just gazed at the smoke haze above Lundene, the darkness darkening a summer sky, and wished I were a bird, high in that nothingness, vanishing. Haesten
Bernard Cornwell
#85. The men, who a moment before had been cursing and cumbersome creatures clambering down the clay bank into the clumsy boats, were mysteriously transformed into warrior silhouettes, spiky with weapons, who glided silent and noble through the vaporous night toward the misted shadows of the enemy shore.
Bernard Cornwell
#86. There's plenty of food here," Erik said dismissively. "We have fish traps and eel traps, we net wildfowl and eat well. And the prospect of silver and gold buys a lot of wheat, barley, oats, meat, fish, and ale.
Bernard Cornwell
#87. An enemy sees his attackers laughing? It is better than all the insults. A man who laughs as he goes into battle is a man who has confidence, and a man with confidence is terrifying to an enemy. "For the whore!" I shouted.
Bernard Cornwell
#88. The existence of tricks does not imply the absence of magic.
Bernard Cornwell
#90. Do you really think men and women thanked you for bringing them peace? They just became bored with your peace and so brewed their own trouble to fill the boredom. Men don't want peace, Arthur, they want distraction from tedium,
Bernard Cornwell
#91. And I must be nineteen by now, lord! Maybe even twenty?" "Eighteen?" I suggested. "I could have been married four years ago, lord!" We
Bernard Cornwell
#92. But men inspired by prophecy will attempt any foolishness in the knowledge that the fates have ordained their victory.
Bernard Cornwell
#93. Anyone who claims to have an entirely clear conscience is almost certainly a bore.
Bernard Cornwell
#94. He doesn't want to face Englishmen,' the Lord of Douglas said, and he knew he was right. Ever since the Scottish knights
Bernard Cornwell
#95. 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.
Bernard Cornwell
#96. Hengall the Warrior hated war. The business of life, he liked to say, is to plant grain, not blades.
Bernard Cornwell
#97. Prisoners!" Finan shouted, and I suspected he was shouting at me because I had so blatantly ignored my own insistence that we take men captive.
Bernard Cornwell
#99. And when you speak with him," I said, "tell him to stop hitting his wife." Erkenwald jerked as though I had just struck him in the face. "It is his Christian duty," he said stiffly, "to discipline his wife, and it is her duty to submit. Did you not listen to what I preached?
Bernard Cornwell
#100. It would cause nothing but madness, Thomas thought. Men would fight for it, lie for it, cheat for it, betray for it and die for it. The Church would make money from it. It would cause nothing but evil, he thought, for it stirred horror from men's hearts,
Bernard Cornwell
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