Bernard Cornwell Quotes
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It's fun. I sit down every day and tell stories. Some folk would kill to get that chance.
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Remember, Mr Sharpe, an officer's eyes are more valuable than his sword!
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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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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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'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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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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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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...all battles had to be fought one step at a time. No point in worrying about the future if there was to be no future, so he and and Harper worked patiently away.
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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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It seemed that if someone was lost in Copenhagen then the citizens regarded it as their duty to offer help.
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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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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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'Whoa there, lad! Whoa! Gentle now! Die well, die well.'
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Sir Thomas was a sentimental man. He loved Soldiers. He had once thought all men who wore the red coat were rogues and thieves, the scourings of the gutters, and since he had joined the army he had discovered he was right, but he had also learned to love them. He loved their patience, their ferocity, their endurance, and their bravery.
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'You can keep your sword, for you fought proper. Like a proper soldier. Take your blade to paradise, and tell them you were killed by another proper soldier.'
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One book at a time... though I'm usually doing the research for others while I'm writing, but that sort of research is fairly desultory and I like to stick to the book being written - and writing a book concentrates the mind so the research is more productive.
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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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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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He wondered again, for the hundredth hundredth time, why these men, reckoned by their country to be the dregs of society, fought so well, so willingly, so bravely.
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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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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 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.'
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'So I do my duty, and land in the shit.' 'You have at last seized the essence of soldiering.'