“Every day is ordinary, until it isn't.”
― Bernard Cornwell, quote from Death of Kings
“There are seasons of our lives when nothing seems to be happening, when no smoke betrays a burned town or homestead and few tears are shed for the newly dead. I have learned not to trust those times, because if the world is at peace then it means someone is planning war.”
― Bernard Cornwell, quote from Death of Kings
“- Senhor Uhtred! - Como sempre, Willibald reagiu à minha provocação. - Esse peixe - ele apontou o dedo trêmulo na direção dos ossos - foi um dos dois que Nosso Senhor usou para alimentar 5 mil pessoas!
- O outro devia ser um peixe incrivelmente grande - respondi. - O que era? Uma baleia?”
― Bernard Cornwell, quote from Death of Kings
“...victory does not come to men who listen to their fears.”
― Bernard Cornwell, quote from Death of Kings
“- Senhor Uhtred! - O padre Willibald veio correndo na minha direção. - O que está acontecendo? O que está acontecendo?
- Decidi começar uma guerra, padre - respondi cheio de animação. - É muito mais interessante que a paz.”
― Bernard Cornwell, quote from Death of Kings
“If you roll the dice often enough you always get the numbers you want. If I tell you the sun will shine tomorrow and that it will rain and there will be snow and that clouds will cover the sky and that wind will blow and that it will be a calm day and that thunder will deafen us, then one of those things will turn out to be true and you'll forget the rest because you want to believe that I really can tell the future.”
― Bernard Cornwell, quote from Death of Kings
“Some had hurled spears first. Those spears thumped into our shields, making them unwieldy, but it hardly mattered. The leading Danes tripped on the hidden timbers and the men behind pushed the falling men forward. I kicked one in the face, feeling my iron-reinforced boot crush bone. Danes were sprawling at our feet while others tried to get past their fallen comrades to reach our line, and we were killing. Two men succeeded in reaching us, despite the smoking barricade, and one of those two feel to Wasp-Sting coming up from beneath his shield-rim. He had been swinging an ax that the man behind me caught on his shield and the Dane was still holding the war ax's shaft as I saw his eyes widen, saw the snarl of his mouth turn to agony as I saw his eyes widen, saw the snarl of his mouth turn to agony as I twisted the blade, ripping it upward, and as Cerdic, beside me, chopped his own ax down. The man with the crushed face was holding my ankle and I stabbed at him as the blood spray from Cerdic's ax blinded me. The whimpering man at my feet tried to crawl away, but Finan stabbed his sword into his thigh, then stabbed again. A Dane had hooked up his ax over the top rim of my shield and hauled it down to expose my body to a spear-thrust, but the ax rolled off the circular shield and the spear was deflected upward and I slammed Wasp-Sting forward again, felt her bite, twisted her, and Finan was keening his mad Irish song as he added his own blade to the slaughter. “Keep the shields touching!” I shouted at my men.”
― Bernard Cornwell, quote from Death of Kings
“The crews of the Viking ships are Danish, Norse, Frisian, and Saxon.”
― Bernard Cornwell, quote from Death of Kings
“Because I’m tired of Wessex,” I said, “tired of priests, tired of being told what your god’s will is, tired of being told that I’m a sinner, tired of your endless damned nonsense, tired of that nailed tyrant you call god who only wants us to be miserable. And I refused to give the oath because my ambition is to go back north, to Bebbanburg, and to kill the men who hold it, and I cannot do that if I am sworn to Edward and he wants something different of me.”
― Bernard Cornwell, quote from Death of Kings
“No, fate is difficult. 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 choice?”
― Bernard Cornwell, quote from Death of Kings
“I hated his religion and its cold disapproving gaze, its malevolence that cloaked itself in pretended kindness, and its allegiance to a god who would drain the joy from the world by naming it sin,”
― Bernard Cornwell, quote from Death of Kings
“I don’t fight old men,” he said. That was strange. No one had ever called me old before. I remember laughing, but there was shock behind my laughter. Weeks before, talking with Æthelflaed, I had mocked her because she was staring at her face in a great silver platter. She was worried because she had lines about her eyes and she had responded to my mockery by thrusting the plate at me, and I had looked at my reflection and seen that my beard was gray. I remember staring at it as she laughed at me, and I did not feel old even though my wounded leg could be treacherously stiff. Was that how people saw me? As an old man? Yet I was forty-five years old that year, so yes, I was an old man.”
― Bernard Cornwell, quote from Death of Kings
“There are seasons of our lives when nothing seems to be happening, when no smoke betrays a burned town or homestead and few tears are shed for the newly dead. I have learned not to trust those times, because if the world is at peace then it means someone is planning war. Spring”
― Bernard Cornwell, quote from Death of Kings
“My banner was behind me and that banner would attract ambitious men. They wanted my skull as a drinking cup, my name as a trophy. They watched me as I watched them and they saw a man covered in mud, but a warlord with a wolf-crested helmet and arm rings of gold and with close-linked mail and a cloak of darkest blue hemmed with golden threads and a sword that was famous throughout Britain. Serpent-Breath was famous, but I sheathed her anyway, because a long blade is no help in the shield wall’s embrace, and instead I drew Wasp-Sting, short and lethal. I kissed her blade then bellowed my challenge at the winter wind.
“Come and kill me! Come and kill me!”
And they came.”
― Bernard Cornwell, quote from Death of Kings
“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, quote from Death of Kings
“Because I’m tired of Wessex,’ I said, ‘tired of priests, tired of being told what your god’s will is, tired of being told that I’m a sinner, tired of your endless damned nonsense, tired of that nailed tyrant you call god who only wants us to be miserable.”
― Bernard Cornwell, quote from Death of Kings
“If he was still alive, I thought. I knelt to him, then to Osferth, and I left. We walked in silence to a cloistered courtyard where the last roses of summer had dropped their petals on the damp grass. We sat on a stone bench and listened to the mournful chants echoing from the passageway. “The archbishop wanted me dead,” I said. “I”
― Bernard Cornwell, quote from Death of Kings
“Serpent-Breath was famous...Wasp-Sting, short and lethal.”
― Bernard Cornwell, quote from Death of Kings
“Men do not relish the shield wall. They do not rush to death's embrace. You look ahead and see the overlapping shields, the helmets, the glint of axes and spears and swords, and you know you must go into the reach of those blades, into the place of death, and it takes time to summon the courage, to heat the blood, to let the madness overtake caution.”
― Bernard Cornwell, quote from Death of Kings
“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, quote from Death of Kings
“but men inspired by prophecy will attempt any foolishness in the knowledge that the fates have ordained their victory.”
― Bernard Cornwell, quote from Death of Kings
“He had pretended to be full of remorse, and shouted that remorse to the sky, “No more tits, God! No more tits! Keep me from tits!” and I remembered how Alfred had turned away in frustrated disgust. “Exanceaster,”
― Bernard Cornwell, quote from Death of Kings
Bernard Cornwell
Born place: in London, England, The United Kingdom
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“He softly sighed. ‘I really wish I could help you out, baby. But I just have an empty space where normal people store their files on feelings.’ He grinned. ‘I blame my parents for that defect like I blame them for my other ten million fuck-ups.”
― C.C. Gibbs, quote from All He Desires
“The human eye has to be one of the cruelest tricks nature ever pulled. We can see a tiny, cone-shaped area of light right in front of our faces, restricted to a very narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum. We can’t see around walls, we can’t see heat or cold, we can’t see electricity or radio signals, we can’t see at a distance. It is a sense so limited that we might as well not have it, yet we have evolved to depend so heavily on it as a species that all other perception has atrophied. We have wound up with the utterly mad and often fatal delusion that if we can’t see something, it doesn’t exist. Virtually all of civilization’s failures can be traced back to that one ominous sentence: ‘I’ll believe it when I see it.’ We can’t even convince the public that global warming is dangerous. Why? Because carbon dioxide happens to be invisible.”
― David Wong, quote from This Book Is Full of Spiders
“Ugh,” I snort in disgust. No doubt that girl’s some goddy rich trot living the sweet life farther inland, in one of LA’s upper-class sectors. Who cares what she scored on her Trial? The whole test is rigged in favor of the wealthy kids, anyway, and she’s probably just someone with average smarts who bought her high score.”
― Marie Lu, quote from Life Before Legend: Stories of the Criminal and the Prodigy
“honey, I am that good. I know what you want, and I can give it to you. Anytime you want it. Anytime I want it. That's why you want to be here with me”
― Jaci Burton, quote from Changing the Game
“Some people think that evolutionary psychology claims to have discovered that human nature is selfish and wicked. But they are flattering the researchers and anyone who would claim to have discovered the opposite. No one needs a scientist to measure whether humans are prone to knavery. The question has been answered in the history books, the newspapers, the ethnographic record, and the letters to Ann Landers. But people treat it like an open question, as if someday science might discover that it's all a bad dream and we will wake up to find that it is human nature to love one another.”
― Steven Pinker, quote from How the Mind Works
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