“For an hour, blended with all she could offer, something noble had been created which had nothing to do with the physical world. And from the turn of his throat, the warmth of his hair, the strong, slender sinews of his hands, something further; which had. Though she combed the earth and searched through the smoke of the galaxies there was no being she wanted but this, who was not and should not be for Philippa Somerville.”
― Dorothy Dunnett, quote from Checkmate
“Where are the links of the chain ... joining us to the past?”
― Dorothy Dunnett, quote from Checkmate
“My son took many years to learn the simple truth. You cannot love any one person adequately until you have made friends with the rest of the human race also. Adult love demands qualities which cannot be learned living in a vacuum of resentment.”
― Dorothy Dunnett, quote from Checkmate
“We have reached the open sea, with some charts; and the firmament.”
― Dorothy Dunnett, quote from Checkmate
“You might, without my crediting it, fall deeply in love and forever, with some warped hunchback whelped in the gutter. I should equally stop you from taking him.”
― Dorothy Dunnett, quote from Checkmate
“Philippa allowed polite regret to inform every muscle. ‘Whatever day it occurs,’ she said, ‘I feel I have a previous engagement.’
‘May I congratulate you,’ he said agreeably, ‘on your evident popularity.’
‘Anything I can do,’ Philippa said, ‘to save you from the exhaustions of pluralism.”
― Dorothy Dunnett, quote from Checkmate
“It doesn’t do my self-esteem much good though, does it?’
‘Your self-esteem has had a lifetime of steady attention,’ said Philippa abstractedly.”
― Dorothy Dunnett, quote from Checkmate
“You haven’t enough artillery, have you?’
‘Against you or the Germans?’ said Lymond.”
― Dorothy Dunnett, quote from Checkmate
“Intolerance drunk is bad enough, but intolerance sober is quite insupportable.”
― Dorothy Dunnett, quote from Checkmate
“Since I doubt, at the moment, whether I can stomach any hysterical verbiage, suppose we simply say what we mean.”
― Dorothy Dunnett, quote from Checkmate
“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.”
― Dorothy Dunnett, quote from Checkmate
“There is no one to understand us, except ourselves.”
― Dorothy Dunnett, quote from Checkmate
“I can live alone, but it is better to have someone else to concern oneself with; to help and be helped by. There is nothing so strong as a family.”
― Dorothy Dunnett, quote from Checkmate
“Nine-tenths of every attack is bluff. The art is to know when to call it.”
― Dorothy Dunnett, quote from Checkmate
“The more modest your expectations, the less often you will court disappointment.”
― Dorothy Dunnett, quote from Checkmate
“And that was when she realized that laughter, which they had lost, had come back to them, and they were whole again.”
― Dorothy Dunnett, quote from Checkmate
“We are here. We will work together for what purpose seems to us right. We will work with calm, and with tolerance and, please God, with saving laughter.
‘We know something of men. We know of evil, and of sloth, and of self-seeking ambition. We accept it, and will use what we have of wit and good faith to overcome it.
‘And if we do not overcome it, still we are the road; we are the bridge; we are the conduit. For something have we been born. For something have we been brought here. And if we hold firm, the men who peopled our earth need not be ashamed, when the reckoning comes, to say, we worked with all we had been given; and for one another.’”
― Dorothy Dunnett, quote from Checkmate
“My name is Francis Crawford, and my brother and I studied at St Barbe.’
‘I know that,’ said Moses. He took the ring, and stood, the broad grin stamped on his features. ‘It is true what you did to all the Professors’ boots?’
Lymond stared at him. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Yes. I’m afraid it is.’
‘Is it true about the mathematical proposition you placed before Orontius Finnaeus that spelt …’
‘I don’t know how you heard about it,’ said M. de Sevigny. ‘Perhaps you had better not tell me what else you know about my misspent youth.’
Moses said, ‘When the ladies of the rue Glatigny were invited …?’
‘That,’ said M. de Sevigny, ‘is what I meant.”
― Dorothy Dunnett, quote from Checkmate
“For a moment, disconnected by the stitch in his side, he listened not to the sense but to the interplay of the two flexible voices, one masculine and light, one mellow and feminine, unreeling their story, faintly affronted amid mounting hysteria. He opened his eyes.
He knew, because his memories of Francis Crawford went back further than those of anyone there, that Lymond was rather drunk, although he could still disguise it. The quick-wittedness, the invention, the faultless comedy timing were present at the price of a little concentration which had closed his outer consciousness for the moment. Jerott, no longer laughing, sat in the shadows and watched the dazzling performance and both the players, blond and brown, artist and acolyte.
Acolyte. But Philippa was a child no longer: he had known that since that single evening in Lyon. The severe, clear-skinned profile turned towards Francis might have belonged to any great lady. The brown and brilliant gaze only quizzed him at intervals: she seemed able, Jerott saw, to sense by instinct the course of his fantasy; and as with Lymond, what she was doing at present occupied all her awareness. Then Francis surged to his feet, leaving his robe, and launched into Jason’s querulous tour de force, fractured by interruptions and a mounting fury of incoherent resentment, and finally disintegrating in chaos.”
― Dorothy Dunnett, quote from Checkmate
“Every other woman since Eve has asked to be loved more than honour. But not you.”
― Dorothy Dunnett, quote from Checkmate
“Tant que je vive, mon cueur ne changera
Pour nulle vivante, tant soit elle bonne ou sage
Forte et puissante, riche de hault lignaige
Mon chois est fait, aultrene se fera
***
Long as I live, my heart will never vary
For no one else, however fair or good
Brave, resolute, or rich, of gentle blood
My choice is made, and I will have no other.”
― Dorothy Dunnett, quote from Checkmate
“If they place the sun in my right hand and the moon in my left and ask me to give up my mission, I will not give it up until the truth prevails or I myself perish in the attempt.”
― Dorothy Dunnett, quote from Checkmate
“I wrote you.’
‘I didn’t get it,’ said Archie.
‘I wrote Applegarth as well,’ said Adam angrily.
‘He didn’t get it either. He’s away for a day or two. Jesus,’ said Archie, ‘are ye not keen to come in? You must be fair wore out with all that writing.”
― Dorothy Dunnett, quote from Checkmate
“If you’re the first of November, you’re Scorpio. A large reporter of his owne Acts. Prudent of behaviour in owne affairs. A lover of Quarrels and theevery, a promoter of frayes and commotions. As wavery as the wind; neither fearing God or caring for Man.’
‘Better,’ said Lymond coldly, ‘to be stung by a nettle than pricked by a rose.”
― Dorothy Dunnett, quote from Checkmate
“I have a suggestion in that case,’ said Lymond. ‘You two have the orgy, and I’ll keep the drinker’s headache.”
― Dorothy Dunnett, quote from Checkmate
“Lord James said, ‘We have no doubts of Lord Culter’s constancy. We wish to know where your faith stands.’
‘Why?’ said Crawford with distinct querulousness. He added, ‘I thought we were discussing pourpoints.’
Lord James Stewart took a turn to the window and back. He said, ‘If you take a ball through your breastplate tomorrow, a pourpoint will not preserve you from hell.’
‘No, but my breastplate would,’ said Crawford irritably. ‘It’s a new kind I had made in Russia. Anyway, who isn’t going to hell?’
‘Richard your brother,’ said Lord James ill-advisedly.
‘Then that settles it,’ said Lymond, satisfied, and began folding his draperies.”
― Dorothy Dunnett, quote from Checkmate
“There breaks a crutch Scotland never knew it possessed.”
― Dorothy Dunnett, quote from Checkmate
“All the linear delicacy of the boy he had once been stood exposed now in the still, blindfolded face of her son. The clinging yellow hair, orderly on the white linen, was the same silk that had veiled her rings when she had smoothed his pillow in childhood; the cheekbone under the bandage had once, fresh and firm, been pressed to her own; the beautiful hands, lying loose on the damask, belonged to him and also to another man, whom she had placed before all others, and always would.”
― Dorothy Dunnett, quote from Checkmate
“Behind the last door is oblivion. Standing before it, one can go forwards or backwards; but beside it are not the places of exquisite pleasure: the faces of pure ones confined to pavilions, reclining on green cushions and beautiful carpets amid thornless lote-trees and banana trees, one over another; for these have gone with the smoke of the opium.
What remains, four years afterwards, are the haunted rooms of the departed: of a young, vigorous man with red hair and an old man left in his blood in a bothy; of a henchman dragged from his horse with an arrow in him, and another, darker of skin, dead of fighting in a Greek courtyard. Of a man returning from perilous seas to drown, seeking his son, near his homeland; of a girl dying blind behind yellow silk curtains, and another burning at night in an African pavilion. And a child, a son … an only son … playing with shells at the feet of the father who shortly would kill it.
One does not, of set purpose, linger long on such a threshold. Sooner or later, the chains must give way; the accusing, querulous voices cease; and the insistent, imperious summons, saying over and over, ‘Aucassins, damoisiax, sire! Ja sui jou li vostre amie, Et vos ne me haés mie!”
― Dorothy Dunnett, quote from Checkmate
“Our motive in locking it, if it matters, was to spare you the embarrassment of an interruption. Unless the comte de Sevigny of today is really so different from the Master of Culter of ten years ago?’
Perfectly at his ease, the decorative young man he was addressing leaned back on the shutters and studied him. ‘I hope so,’ Lymond said. ‘When you were twenty, Mr Erskine, you killed a priest in the belltower at Montrose. Would you do so again?”
― Dorothy Dunnett, quote from Checkmate
Dorothy Dunnett
Born place: in Dunfermline, Scotland, The United Kingdom
Born date August 25, 1923
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“Irene Finney filled the void with a child not loved then lost, but first lost, then loved.”
― Louise Penny, quote from A Rule Against Murder
“The library was like a stone quarry where no rain had fallen in ten thousand years. Way off in that direction: silence. Way off in that direction: hush. It was the time between things finished and things begun. Nobody died here. Nobody was born. The library, and all its books, just were. We”
― Ray Bradbury, quote from Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales
“I have to live and make my own choices, my own mistakes. You have to let me be me, even if i suck at it sometimes." - Adria”
― J.A. Redmerski, quote from The Mayfair Moon
“Don't, he says and then places his free hand underneath mine.”
― J.A. Redmerski, quote from Kindred
“When you're surrounded by stupidity, self-preservation isn't a sin.”
― Meljean Brook, quote from Riveted
The Hour of the Star
Devoured
Nothing Left to Lose
Cosmos
Sweet Thing
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