“But fate, as Merlin always taught us, is inexorable. Life is a jest of the Gods, Merlin liked to claim, and there is no justice. You must learn to laugh, he once told me, or else you'll just weep y...”

“You will not say how you are haunted by the faces of the men you killed, how in their last gasp of life they sought your pity and you had none. You will not speak of the boys who died screaming for...”

“The bards sing of love, they celebrate slaughter, they extol kings and flatter queens, but were I a poet I would write in praise of friendship.”

“A sad, plangent music. In the British camp, Sharpe thought, they would be singing, but no one was singing here.”

“The shield wall reeks of shit, and all a man wants is to be home, to be anywhere but on this field that prepares for battle, but none of us will turn and run or else we will be despised for ever. W...”

“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 fall...”

“Yes, I was infatuated with you: I am still. No one has ever heightened such a keen capacity of physical sensation in me. I cut you out because I couldn't stand being a passing fancy. Before I give ...”

“Throw your dreams into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back, a new life, a new friend, a new love, a new country.”

“By embracing your subconscious, you gain a different way of seeing and experiencingan expanded perception that opens a doorway, not only to lucid dreams, but also to the mythic dimension. As in lu...”

“No sentimentality, no romance, no false hope, no self-petting lies, merely that which is!”

“False hope is a terrible thing, if its the only thing keeping you alive you'll be dead by dawn.”

“That would be the death of anyone - to recognize false hopes with a certainty. One mustn't know that. If it is offered, refuse!”

“Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.”

“Here one comes upon an all-important English trait: the respect for constituitionalism and legality, the belief in 'the law' as something above the state and above the individual, something which i...”

“It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality”