“I am not sure,' Mordecai told Thomas, 'whether omens can be trusted.'
'Of course they can.'
'I should like to hear your reasons. But show me your urine first.'
'You said I was cured,' Thomas protested. 'Eternal vigilance, dear Thomas, is the price of health. Piss for me.”
― Bernard Cornwell, quote from Vagabond
“It was while he was on the tower that
Robbie came to the rampart beneath.
'I want you to look at this,' Robbie called up to him, and flourished a newly painted shield. 'You like it?'
Thomas peered down and, in the moonlight, saw something red. 'What is it?' he asked. 'A blood smear?'
'You blind English bastard,' Robbie said, 'it's the red heart of Douglas!'
'Ah. From up here it looks like
something died on the shield.”
― Bernard Cornwell, quote from Vagabond
“People like mystery. They want nothing explained, because when things are explained then there is no hope left. I have seen folk dying and known there is nothing to be done, and I am asked to go because the priest will soon arrive with his dish covered by a cloth, and everyone prays for a miracle. It never happens. And the person dies and I get blamed, not God or the priest, but I!”
― Bernard Cornwell, quote from Vagabond
“You're giving up the hunt for de Taillebourg?' Thomas asked. He had learned the priest's name from Robbie. 'No.' Robbie still had his head back as he stared at the magnificence of the transept's ceiling. 'I'll find him and then I'll gralloch the bastard.' Thomas did not know what gralloch meant, but decided the word was bad news for de Taillebourg.”
― Bernard Cornwell, quote from Vagabond
“Does that girl work here?' Robbie asked, gesturing at the screen behind which Mary had disappeared. 'All her life,' Sir Giles said. 'You remember Mary, Thomas?' 'I tried to drown her when we were both children,' Thomas said.”
― Bernard Cornwell, quote from Vagabond
“The first stone, thrown by Hellgiver, crashed through the roof of a dyer's house close to St Brieuc's church and took off the heads of an English man-at-arms and the dyer's wife. A joke went through the garrison that the two bodies were so crushed together by the boulder that they would go on coupling throughout eternity.”
― Bernard Cornwell, quote from Vagabond
“The Holy Grail, the most precious of all Christ’s bequests to man, lost these thousand years and more, and he could see it glowing in the sky like shining blood and about it, bright as the glittering crown of a saint, rays of dazzling shimmer filled the heaven. Thomas”
― Bernard Cornwell, quote from Vagabond
“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, quote from Vagabond
“Remember that your very first words, actions, and attitudes invariably sound the keynote.”
― Les Giblin, quote from How to Have Confidence and Power in Dealing with People
“It was in this situation that she penetrated as a vague shape into the existence of Thomas. Everything there appeared desolate and mournful. Deserted shores where deeper and deeper absences, abandoned by the eternally departed sea after a magnificent shipwreck, gradually decomposed. She passed through strange dead cities where, rather than petrified shapes, mummified circumstances, she found a necropolis of movements, silences, voids; she hurled herself against the extraordinary sonority of nothingness which is made of the reverse of sound, and before her spread forth wondrous falls, dreamless sleep, the fading away which buries the dead in a life of dream, the death by which every man, even the weakest spirit, becomes spirit itself.”
― Maurice Blanchot, quote from Thomas the Obscure
“We could talk..." I take a long inhale off my cigarette and gradually let it out, smoke circling my face. "If you want to."
She tenses as she shakes her head and stares out the window to the side of her. "I want to play make believe for just a little bit longer."
God, i've never felt my heart shatter for someone else more than I have at this moment.”
― Jessica Sorensen, quote from The Probability of Violet & Luke
“The feeling of pain never leaves. With every beat of my heart, I am reminded that it remains. It festers within me like an infection. Life’s antibiotic for pain associated with how we feel is communication.”
― Scott Hildreth, quote from Broken People
“I’m not afraid of the dead,” Streng remembered saying. “I’m afraid of what made them dead.”
― Jack Kilborn, quote from Afraid
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