Top 200 Bernard Cornwell Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Because there could not be peace, not while two tribes shared one land. One tribe must win. Even the nailed god cannot change that truth. And I was a warrior, and in a world at war the warrior must be cruel.”

— Bernard Cornwell

52. “Cnut Longsword had near killed me with his blade Ice-Spite and it was small consolation that Serpent-Breath had sliced his throat in the same heartbeat that his sword had broken a rib and pierced my lung.”

— Bernard Cornwell

53. “What I mean by that is that the point of life, as I see it, is not to write books or scale mountains or sail oceans, but to achieve happiness, and preferably an unselfish happiness.”

— Bernard Cornwell

54. “I recalled that a man named Judas had betrayed the nailed god. That never made any sense to me. The god had to be nailed to a cross if he was to become their savior, and then the Christians blame the man who made that death possible. I thought they should worship him as a saint, but instead they revile him as a betrayer.”

— Bernard Cornwell

55. “The crews of the Viking ships are Danish, Norse, Frisian, and Saxon.”

— Bernard Cornwell

56. “There is such joy in chaos. Stow all the world’s evils behind a door and tell men that they must never, ever, open the door, and it will be opened because there is pure joy in destruction.”

— Bernard Cornwell

57. “I hated Alfred. He was a miserable, pious, tight-fisted king who distrusted me because I was no Christian, because I was a northerner, and because I had given him his kingdom back at Ethandun. And as reward he had given me Fifhaden. Bastard.”

— Bernard Cornwell

58. “There is a thing called the blood feud. All societies have them, even the West Saxons have them, despite their vaunted piety. Kill a member of my family and I shall kill one of yours, and so it goes on, generation after generation or until one family is all dead, and Kjartan had just wished a blood feud on himself. I did not know how, I did not know where, I could not know when, but I would revenge Ragnar. I swore it that night.”

— Bernard Cornwell

59. “We live in a world where the strongest win, and the strongest must expect to be disliked.”

— Bernard Cornwell

60. “The rules were simple: trust no one, be ever watchful and if trouble came hit first and hit hard. It had worked for him so far.”

— Bernard Cornwell

61. “I was just twenty-one and my name was known wherever men sharpened swords. I was a warrior. A sword warrior, and I was proud of it.”

— Bernard Cornwell

62. “He wanted to improve the world, while I did not believe and never have believed that we can improve the world, just merely survive as it slides into chaos.”

— Bernard Cornwell

63. “Truth is ever feeble against passionate falsehood.”

— Bernard Cornwell

64. “There’s a time for caution,’ I said, ’and a time to just kill the bastards.”

— Bernard Cornwell

65. “Madness ends sometimes. The Gods decree it, not man.”

— Bernard Cornwell

66. “Win your war, Lord Uhtred,” he said, “then take her away from us priests and give her lots of children. She’ll be happy, and one day she’ll be truly wise. That’s the women’s real gift, to be wise, and not many men have it.”

— Bernard Cornwell

67. “Violence may not be good, my friend, but it has a certain efficiency in the resolution of otherwise insoluble problems.”

— Bernard Cornwell

68. “So long as we remember names, so long those people live.”

— Bernard Cornwell

69. “I believe the Gods hate to be bored, so I do my best to amuse them. That way they smile on me. Your God,’ Merlin said sourly, ’despises amusement, demanding grovelling worship instead. He must be a very sorry creature.”

— Bernard Cornwell

70. “I look at those parchments, which are deeds saying that Uhtred, son of Uhtred, is the lawful and sole owner of the lands that are carefully marked by stones and by dykes, by oaks and by ash, by marsh and by sea, and I dream of those lands, wavebeaten and wild beneath the winddriven sky. I dream, and know that one day I will take back the land from those who stole it from me.”

— Bernard Cornwell

71. “Christianity is not a religion that offers the solace of revenge to its adherents. For that you must go to the old women who know which herbs to pluck and what charms to say under a waning moon.”

— Bernard Cornwell

72. “The gods are not kind to us, any more than children are kind to their toys. We are here to amuse the gods, and at times it amuses them to be unkind.”

— Bernard Cornwell

73. “All those separate people were a part of my life, strings strung on the frame of Uhtred, and though they were separate they affected one another and together they would make the music of my life.”

— Bernard Cornwell

74. “So she needs a man!” Hakeswill said. “And a sergeant’s widow doesn’t get rogered by a stinking bit of dirt like you. It ain’t right. Ain’t natural. It’s beneath her station, Sharpie, and it can’t be allowed. Says so in the scriptures.”

— Bernard Cornwell

75. “I wanted to see a pattern in the strands of life. In the end I found one, and it had nothing to do with any god, but with people. With the people we love.”

— Bernard Cornwell

76. “Am I to deny Mark justice because he is old and gross and ugly? Do youth and beauty deserve perverted justice? What have I fought for all these years, if not to make certain that justice is even-handed?”

— Bernard Cornwell

77. “She is a woman, and what women want, they get, and if the world and all it holds must be broken in the getting, then so be it.”

— Bernard Cornwell

78. “Words are like breath,” she said, “you say them and they’re gone. But writing traps them.”

— Bernard Cornwell

79. “The poets, when they speak of war, talk of the shield wall, they talk of the spears and arrows flying, of the blade beating on the shield, of the heroes who fall and the spoils of the victors, but I was to discover that war was really about food. About feeding men and horses. About finding food. The army that eats wins.”

— Bernard Cornwell

80. “And Eoferwic, I thought, was where my story had all begun. Where my father had died. Where I had become the Lord of Bebbanburg. Where I had met Ragnar and learned of the ancient gods.”

— Bernard Cornwell

81. “Alfred was obsessed by order, obsessed by the task of marshaling life’s chaos into something that could be controlled. He would do it by the church and by the law, which are much the same thing, but I wanted to see a pattern in the strands of life. In the end I found one, and it had nothing to do with any god, but with people. With the people we love.”

— Bernard Cornwell

82. “Cowardice is always with us, and bravery, the thing that provokes the poets to make their songs about us, is merely the will to overcome the fear.”

— Bernard Cornwell

83. “No man wanted to face warriors like Finan in battle.”

— Bernard Cornwell

84. “I was angry. I wanted blood in the dawn.”

— Bernard Cornwell

85. “Someone wise, I forget who, said we must leave our children to fate.”

— Bernard Cornwell

86. “Putting a cat into a stable doesn’t make it a horse.”

— Bernard Cornwell

87. “It was the year 878, I was twenty-one years old and believed my swords could win me the whole world. I was Uhtred of Bebbanburg, the man who had killed Ubba Lothbrokson beside the sea and who had spilled Svein of the White Horse from his saddle at Ethandun. I was the man who had given Alfred his kingdom back and I hated him. So I would leave him. My path was the sword-path, and it would take me home. I would go north.”

— Bernard Cornwell

88. “Ragnall Ivarson. I had never met him, but I knew him. I knew his reputation. No man sailed a ship better, no man fought more fiercely, no man was held in more fear. He was a savage, a pirate, a wild king of nowhere.”

— Bernard Cornwell

89. “Silence. We like it when an audience is silent, when no one coughs, no one shuffles, no one cracks a nut, or uncorks an ale bottle with a sudden hiss. Silence means the play is working, and we have the audience in our power. To a player, that breathless silence is better than applause, and that morning in the great hall my audience was silent.”

— Bernard Cornwell

90. “When a man must choose between nothing and everything he has small choice.”

— Bernard Cornwell

91. “Skin the colour of chestnuts.”

— Bernard Cornwell

92. “I’m getting old,” I said again, and that was true. I had lived more than fifty years and most men were lucky to see forty. Yet all old age was bringing was the death of dreams.”

— Bernard Cornwell

93. “Only the gods tell him what to do, and you should beware of men who take their orders from the gods.”

— Bernard Cornwell

94. “How does a lawyer lie?” “With passion, Mr. Starbuck, and with a self-inflicted belief, albeit temporary, that the facts he is reciting are the very stuff of God’s own truth.”

— Bernard Cornwell

95. “History is not just a tale of men’s making, but is a thing tied to the land. We call a hill by the name of a hero who died there, or name a river after a princess who fled beside its banks, and when the old names vanish, the stories go with them and the new names carry no reminder of the past.”

— Bernard Cornwell

96. “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

97. “When rumours fly, when false tales are being told, be the storyteller.”

— Bernard Cornwell

98. “Television is a young person’s medium.”

— Bernard Cornwell

99. “I will never understand Christians. I have seen men and women whip themselves till their backs were nothing but strips of flesh hanging from exposed ribs, watched pilgrims limp on bleeding broken feet to worship the tooth of the whale that swallowed Jonah, and seen a man hammer nails through his own feet. What god wants such nonsense? And why prefer a god who wants you to torture yourself instead of worshipping Eostre who wants you to take a girl into the woods and make babies?”

— Bernard Cornwell

100. “Tell Ragnall,” I told him, “that the Saxons of Mercia are coming. Tell him that his dead will number in the thousands. Tell him that his own death is just days away. Tell him that promise comes from Uhtred of Bebbanburg.”

— Bernard Cornwell