Top 100 Dorothy Dunnett Quotes: Famous Quotes & Sayings About Dorothy Dunnett

#1. He had ridden through the night, without rest and without sleep, for this. It ought, surely, to give someone a moment of wry amusement. He understood - but then he had always understood - how Richard had felt at Philorth.

Dorothy Dunnett

#2. That day, engrossed together in the fate of the child, he met her mind to mind and fell in love with her, with every grain of his spirit and cell of his body; with the essential finality of death.

Dorothy Dunnett

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

Dorothy Dunnett

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

Dorothy Dunnett

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

Dorothy Dunnett

#6. Humility is a virtue Scotsmen require to be taught.

Dorothy Dunnett

#7. The trouble with you, M. le comte de Sevigny, is that you're too god-damned autocratic. From now on, you will kindly remember that a good military tactician requires the support of a team. We are your team.

Dorothy Dunnett

#8. What is your principal characteristic, would you say?'

'Treacherousness,' said Danny, gloriously.

'That,' said Lymond pleasantly, 'is everyone's principal characteristic.

Dorothy Dunnett

#9. Lymond said gently, Let us bathe in moral philosophy, as in a living river. Double-dealing is my business.

Dorothy Dunnett

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

Dorothy Dunnett

#11. Intelligence is the only indispensable commodity in life or in warfare. If you think otherwise, go live in a hut with a poet. The rest of us will do our best to defend you.

Dorothy Dunnett

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

Dorothy Dunnett

#13. Raveand Rhamnusia, Goddes of Dispyte,' said Lymond acidly. 'I am trying to get you home, vide the shiten shepherd and the clene shepe, with your woolly chops spotless. The only drawback to date is that the bloody sheep is going to have to carry the shepherd, so far as I can see.

Dorothy Dunnett

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. Julius brooded. He could see Julius despising the medical school of Pavia. Tobie said, Nicholas managed the journey from Flanders all right. Deferred to you, joked discreetly with me, got on like a dyeworks on fire with the muleteers.

Dorothy Dunnett

#17. Disdainful of fur and fretful, privately, about the cost of his buttons, Jerott Blyth sat like the born horseman he was, and watched discreetly for trouble.

Dorothy Dunnett

#18. There is a Russian proverb,' Nepeja said. 'Beat your shuba, and it will be warmer; beat your wife and she shall be sweeter.'

There was a brief silence, while his hearers considered the analogy. 'Beat your brother and he shall be deader?' at length Danny said.

Dorothy Dunnett

#19. It had been a boy's trick, Jerott remembered. Standing bareback on your father's horses; somersaulting, chariot-riding. Francis, buried in books, had never publicly attempted it. What private practice, Jerott wondered fleetingly, had gone into that?

Dorothy Dunnett

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

Dorothy Dunnett

#21. And isna Sybilla a wee love o' a bitch?'

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

Dorothy Dunnett

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

Dorothy Dunnett

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

Dorothy Dunnett

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

Dorothy Dunnett

#25. His chest heaved, and he coughed.
"You have coughed before," his mother said. "It is a sign of weakness. Control it.

Dorothy Dunnett

#26. But you do not know me,' Lymond said. 'Whereas I know you exceedingly well. You should be glad. I may well find it tedious; but you should have an extremely interesting journey.

Dorothy Dunnett

#27. After I convinced them that I was a harmless novelist, I actually got them to give me a tour of the harem - which is usually off limits for tourists.

Dorothy Dunnett

#28. What Mr Blyth has been engaged in was not love, my dear Francis. It was romance, a thing to which Mr Blyth has been very prone; together with melodrama. Whatever made you think that melodrama makes Mr Blyth uncomfortable? He revels in it.

Dorothy Dunnett

#29. Your husband appears to possess an uncanny gift for seducing his enemies.

Dorothy Dunnett

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

Dorothy Dunnett

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

Dorothy Dunnett

#32. Think for yourselves for a change. You've been pedlars: go and be merchants. You've been mercenaries: go and find something of your own to defend. You've finished teething and there's the world: crack it open if you can.

Dorothy Dunnett

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

Dorothy Dunnett

#34. I prefer a society which accepts that I have no choice, and does not pretend that I have. I prefer a God who does what he wills, and rules as he desires, and enjoins on me not to prevent anything against its destiny.

Dorothy Dunnett

#35. We'll do it,' said Will Scott comfortably, shouting over the tumult. 'If it's no more than an hour, we'll do it.'

'Christ, I believe you're sorry, you flaming maniac,' said Lymond. 'Don't I keep telling you that this is bloody childishness, and don't you keep agreeing?

Dorothy Dunnett

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

Dorothy Dunnett

#37. Well, get the coffer out," said Tobie roundly. "You find his clean clothes and I'll cut his hair round his cap and wash his ears out. Then, when we get to the Palazzo Medici, you imitate his voice and I'll sit him on my knee and move his arms up and down. Where is the problem?

Dorothy Dunnett

#38. Elephants gave you less bother, any day.

Dorothy Dunnett

#39. Haven't I been worth five years' excellent gossip to you? Are you not all waiting agog to see me seize my sister-in-law by the hair? When I think of it, damn it, I'm a public benefactor.

Dorothy Dunnett

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

Dorothy Dunnett

#41. 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

#42. It was hard to say therefore why he did not go below, and rally his brother, and encourage him to let the past fade, and look forward to what lay before him. Unless, in his heart of hearts he recognized as Lymond did that what lay around him were shut gates; and what lay before him was nothing.

Dorothy Dunnett

#43. Jenny Fleming merely looked exasperated. 'That young man,' she said, 'ought to be plucked out of his pride and impaled on a thornbush. He introduced me to someone as the Controller of the King's Beam, last time we met.' Which at least had the merit of making her daughter laugh, if a little wildly.

Dorothy Dunnett

#44. To save our friends' nerves, I suggest we meet on a plane of brutal courtesy. It need not interfere with our mutual distrust.
-Francis Crawford of Lymond

Dorothy Dunnett

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

Dorothy Dunnett

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

Dorothy Dunnett

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

Dorothy Dunnett

#48. She gave up combing her hair, which the salt air had reduced to a kind of scrim of brown hessian, and, lying down, proceeded to keep her fingernails short in the way Kate admired least. Then she overslept.

Dorothy Dunnett

#49. 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

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

Dorothy Dunnett

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

Dorothy Dunnett

#52. It is not enough,' Robert Reid said, 'to offer justice. The laws of men, the laws of God himself are not enough unless you know the heart, the tongue, the brain, the gut of your people.

Dorothy Dunnett

#53. 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.

Dorothy Dunnett

#54. What's wrong? Has Francis been rude? Then you must try to overlook it. I know you wouldn't think so, but he is thoroughly upset by Tom Erskine's death; and when Francis is troubled he doesn't show it, he just goes and makes life wretched for somebody.

Dorothy Dunnett

#55. Philippa Somerville, standing back a little, did not withdraw her arm. In her white face, a shadow of motherly irritation appeared. 'Has no one here any sense? Be quiet and sit down. The world will look after itself for a night, without your hand on the rim.

Dorothy Dunnett

#56. He will not, I think, find it logical to live with what he has done today. I have told him that you are his responsibility. While he believes that, he will continue to protect you. I tell you this, so that you will understand what is happening. He will measure his life by your helplessness.

Dorothy Dunnett

#57. 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

#58. I wish to make my fortune with you.' 'Well, you can forget about that, for a start,' said Francis Crawford. 'And if your place in Paradise has been written, then for God's sake hang on to it. Because we're going in the opposite direction.

Dorothy Dunnett

#59. 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

#60. And, echoing Jerott, 'So why in hell have you come?' Philippa's gaze, bright and owlish and obstinate, held his to the end.

'To look after the baby,' she answered. And disconcertingly, after a second's blank pause, Francis Crawford flung back his damp head and laughed.

Dorothy Dunnett

#61. What is there but untruth and heartbreak wherever you go?

Dorothy Dunnett

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

Dorothy Dunnett

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

Dorothy Dunnett

#64. Music, the knife without a hilt,

Dorothy Dunnett

#65. Modern war is fought by a number of strong, sweaty horsemen with constipation, who have their eyes on power, on wealth and on glory, and who obey the rules just when it pleases them.

Dorothy Dunnett

#66. It was your brother. He must be insane."

"Not insane, dear." Sybilla, speaking gently, contradicted. "Not insane. But magnificently drunk, I fear.

Dorothy Dunnett

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

Dorothy Dunnett

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

Dorothy Dunnett

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

Dorothy Dunnett

#70. 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.

Dorothy Dunnett

#71. Every ruin is packed like a biscuit box.

Dorothy Dunnett

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

Dorothy Dunnett

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

Dorothy Dunnett

#74. Be kind to her when she comes back. Her love is not only for children but for humanity. She will be a good-hearted and magnificent zealot one day. As her mother is now.
Goodbye, Kate. And below he had signed as he rarely did, with his Christian name.

Dorothy Dunnett

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

Dorothy Dunnett

#76. Like King Lewis of Hungary, who was immaturely born, came of age too soon and was immaturely married, my age is out of joint with my phenomenal destiny.

Dorothy Dunnett

#77. 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.

Dorothy Dunnett

#78. Why?' said Philippa. 'For suffering what you have suffered for three months?' And felt the veils rend about her, for she had broken the unwritten law: it must not be uttered. It must not be uttered, or they could not bear the pain, mirrored over and over.

Dorothy Dunnett

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

Dorothy Dunnett

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

Dorothy Dunnett

#81. For how long can one maintain total vigilance?

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

Dorothy Dunnett

#82. Words is but wind but dunts is the devil

Dorothy Dunnett

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

Dorothy Dunnett

#84. Will he?" said Lymond. "Will you, Marigold?"

Brilliant, youthful face confronted restless one.

A little, malicious smile crossed the Master's face.

"Oh, no, he won't," said Lymond confidently. "He's going to be a naughty, naughty rogue like you and me.

Dorothy Dunnett

#85. And as he followed after the Irishwoman, Margaret Erskine, most levelheaded of women, picked up a Palissy vase, looked at it earnestly and smashed it clean on the floor.

Dorothy Dunnett

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

Dorothy Dunnett

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

Dorothy Dunnett

#88. There was a silence. 'You didn't as,' said Jerott at length. 'But I would have forgone even the body for the sake of the mind. And I would have claimed neither body nor mind, had I discovered a soul.

Dorothy Dunnett

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

Dorothy Dunnett

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

Dorothy Dunnett

#91. It won't be long,' said Philippa cheerfully, her mother's ring in her voice. 'You know what Bess says. There's nothing in this world a drop of aqua-vitae in a sheep's bladder won't cure. Stop the Somervilles with a knife! It needs artillery.' And she blew her nose hard.

Dorothy Dunnett

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

Dorothy Dunnett

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

Dorothy Dunnett

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

Dorothy Dunnett

#95. Tobie. Unless I'm giving off steam, behave normally. I remember what to do. One foot in front of the other, but not both at the same time unless I'm a robin.

Dorothy Dunnett