Bernard Cornwell Quotes
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Death was so channeled and directed by this staircase, yet Sharpe had learned that the steps a man feared most were the ones that had to be taken. He climbed.
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Remember, Mr Sharpe, an officer's eyes are more valuable than his sword!
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He had been a tough, cheerful youngster, the sort who collected birds' eggs, scrapped with other boys and climbed the church tower on a dare, and now he was a tough cheerful young man who thought that being an officer in Lawford's regiment was just about the finest thing life could afford. He liked soldiering and he liked soldiers.
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'We asked for them in February. It's June now; they must be coming.' 'They've been saying that about Christ for eighteen hundred years.'
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The Forlorn Hope was for the brave. It may have been a courage born of desperation, or foolhardiness, but it was courage just the same.
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And the good news is that you've got a brain. You do! Honest! I saw it with my own eyes, thus disproving the navy's stubborn contention that soldiers have nothing whatsoever inside their skulls. I shall write a paper for the Review. I'll be famous! Brain discovered in a soldier.
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'I'll put a word in for you, Sharpe, because a man shouldn't be disciplined for killing the enemy, but I don't suppose my help will do you any good.'
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The Marques' thought he had the Rifleman beaten, but all he had done was to make the Rifleman fight. This no longer looked like a duel to d'Alembord; it looked like a brawl leading to slaughter.
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The first bombs looked like livid shooting stars. Then, as they began their shrieking fall, the bomb trails converged. God had not shown mercy, the British possessed none and Copenhagen must suffer.
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'But the implication of the psalm, is it not, is that we are sheep and that God is our shepherd? Why else would He put us in a pasture and protect us with a staff? But what I have never fully understood is why the shepherd blames the sheep when they become ill.'
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I'll happily mentor anyone who wants mentoring, and most of that goes on by internet rather than face to face.
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If you capture a ship, Sharpe, you keep the old name unless it's really obnoxious. Nelson took the Franklin at the Nile, an eighty gun thing of great beauty, but the navy will be damned if it has a ship named after a traitorous bloody Yankee so we call her the Canopus now.
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This was the might of France, the pride of France, the tactic of the world's first conscript army, and this column, Clausel's counter-attack, ignored cold mathematical logic. It was not defeated by the line.
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I sometimes wonder what would have happened if the first book had not sold... doesn't bear thinking about, but I suppose we'd have made it work somehow.
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Sharpe, Lossow suspected, often got what he wanted, but the achievements never seemed to satisfy. His friend, the German decided, was like a man who, searching for a crock of gold, found ten and rejected them all because the pots were the wrong shape.
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It seemed that if someone was lost in Copenhagen then the citizens regarded it as their duty to offer help.
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A charge of knights was supposed to be thundering death on hooves, a flail of metal driven by the ponderous weight of men, horses and armor, and properly done, it was a mass maker of widows.
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'Would you give my warmest regards to Sir Arthur Wellesley? Or Lord Wellington as we must now call him.' 'You know him, sir?' 'Of course. We were at the Royal Academy of Equiation together, at Angers. It's strange, Major, how your greatest soldier was taught to fight in France.'
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'If I take a man into battle, my lord, i like to offer him a better than even chance that he'll march away with his skin intact. If I wanted to kill the buggers I'd just strangle them in their sleep. It's kinder.'
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'Whoa there, lad! Whoa! Gentle now! Die well, die well.'
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'The Major's a grand big fellow, so he is.' 'So what are we? The damned?' 'We're that, sure enough, but we're also Riflemen, sir. You and me, we're the best God-damned Soldiers in the world.'
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'They'll bloody kill you.' 'Maybe they'll turn and run. 'God save Ireland, and why would they do that?' 'Because God wears a green jacket, of course.'
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I doubt I called him illegitimate, sir. I wouldn't use that sort of word. I probably called him a bastard.
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'It is you, sir?' 'Sergeant Barret, isn't it?' 'Yes, sir.' 'It is me' They bloody hung you, sir.' 'This army can't do anything right, Sergeant.'