Top 150 Dorothy Dunnett Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I would give you my soul in a blackberry pie; and a knife to cut it with.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

2. “Verily, God hath eighteen thousand worlds; and verily, your world is one of them, and this its bright axle-tree.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

3. “Facts are the soil from which the story grows. Imagination is a last resort.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

4. “Elephants gave you less bother, any day.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

5. “Don’t be so sensitive,’ he said, faintly chiding. ‘It makes everyday commerce most trying.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

6. “If they place the sun in my right hand and the moon in my left and ask me to give up my mission, I will not give it up until the truth prevails or I myself perish in the attempt.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

7. “Lucent and delicate, Drama entered, mincing like a cat.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

8. “I,” said Lymond, in the voice unmistakably his which honeyed his most lethal thoughts, “I am a narwhal looking for my virgin. I have sucked up the sea like Charybdis and failing other entertainment will spew it three times daily, for a fee.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

9. “But I despised men who accepted their fate. I shaped mine twenty times and had it broken twenty times in my hands.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

10. “We have reached the open sea, with some charts; and the firmament.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

11. “Oh, Marigold!” Lymond spoke plaintively. “A silken tongue, a heart of cruelty. Don’t berate us. We’re only poor scoundrels – vagabonds – scraps of society; unlettered and untaught.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

12. “It’s true? You have no interest in him? But everyone either abominates Francis Crawford or longs to possess him. I wonder why you alone should be immune.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

13. “Philippa Somerville, standing back a little, did not withdraw her arm. In her white face, a shadow of motherly irritation appeared. ‘Has no one here any sense? Be quiet and sit down. The world will look after itself for a night, without your hand on the rim.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

14. “And habits are hell’s own substitute for good intentions. Habits are the ruin of ambition, of initiative, of imagination. They’re the curse of marriage and the after-bane of death.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

15. “I have learned,’ said Lymond, ’that kindness without love is no kindness.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

16. “Speak, she said, as you would write: as if your words were letters of lead, graven there for all time, for which you must take the consequences. And take the consequences.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

17. “Danny Hislop was not there, nor the artist called Blacklock. Riding between Lymond and the fresh-faced Knight of St John who did not like eagles, Chancellor asked after them. Ludovic d’Harcourt glanced at Lymond without answering. Lymond said, ‘They are undergoing a course of correction. If in the event they are either correct or in the least chastened, I shall be surprised.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

18. “So this was Richard’s brother. Every line of him spoke, palimpsest-wise, with two voices. The clothes, black and rich, were vaguely slovenly; the skin sun-glazed and cracked; the fine eyes slackly lidded; the mouth insolent and self-indulgent. He returned the scrutiny without rancour.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

19. “And deep within him, missing its accustomed tread, his heart paused, and gave one single stroke, as if on an anvil.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

20. “Repressively, Lymond himself answered. “I dislike being discussed as if I were a disease. Nobody ‘got’ me,” he said.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

21. “She gave up combing her hair, which the salt air had reduced to a kind of scrim of brown hessian, and, lying down, proceeded to keep her fingernails short in the way Kate admired least. Then she overslept.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

22. “Good evening, ladies. The gentlemen now entering behind you are all fully armed. I am Francis Crawford of Lymond and I want your lives or your jewels – the latter for preference; both if necessary.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

23. “To succeed as you want, you have to be precise; you have to have polish; you have to carry polish and precision into everything you do. You have no time to sigh over seigneuries and begrudge other people their gifts. Lack of genius never held anyone back,’ said Lymond. ‘Only time wasted on resentment and daydreaming can do that.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

24. “With Jerott Blyth, innkeepers never shirked the proper discharge of their duties. To the doggedness of his Scottish birth, his long residence in France and his profession of arms had lent a particular fluency. He was black-haired, and prepossessing and rude: a masterful combination.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

25. “I shall let you know,’ Lymond said, ’when I am ready to embrace you, and with what. In the meantime should you seek a favour, ask elsewhere.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

26. “The drink was almost certainly safe. He would probably get pleurisy, quinsy and pox from the cup.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

27. “Whether romance existed in him or not, sentimentality had no place at all.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

28. “My son took many years to learn the simple truth. You cannot love any one person adequately until you have made friends with the rest of the human race also. Adult love demands qualities which cannot be learned living in a vacuum of resentment.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

29. “Terror,” said Lymond, “is our daily bread in the Wuthenheer. We eat it, we live by it and we disseminate it; and not only between Christmas and Epiphany: there is no close season for fright.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

30. “Except once, long ago, over an estrangement with his wife Mariotta, Lord Culter had never been jealous of the young brother he had seen grow from babyhood. Until the moment Francis had left home at sixteen, a prisoner of war to the English, Richard knew him solely as a blond and delicate boy, interested only, it seemed, in reading and music, whose apparent fragility concealed a will of steel, and a turn of phrase which could wound like a sword-cut.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

31. “I am too far away now from it all,’ Lymond said. ‘And if we are going to be metaphysical, I have no sea card, or compass, or star.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

32. “And the English army, wheeling, started south at a gallop over the hill pass into Ettrick, followed by twenty men and eight hundred sheep in steel helmets.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

33. “And that was when she realized that laughter, which they had lost, had come back to them, and they were whole again.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

34. “Unlike Francis Crawford, whose game with life was a strange and rootless affair played with the intellect, Jerott had a passionate instinct to live. It was a happy circumstance also that his nervous and bronchial systems were roughly as frail as a bison’s.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

35. “Fools make news, and wise men carry it.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

36. “Kate said, her eyes very large, ‘I find your rudeness abominable and your politeness obnoxious but my goodness, Francis Crawford, what terrifies me more than a jungle of tigers is the moment when you look worried.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

37. “Habits are the ruin of ambition, of initiative, of imagination.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

38. “Quarrelling with the Prince of Barrow was like fighting a curtain. Robin Stewart gave up.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

39. “Although I despise the hanging jaw of hunger, I do not intend that the needy should look to me for their banquet.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

40. “The board is clearing. The old game is almost played, and the pieces broken.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

41. “I have fallen out of the habit of talking to brothers,’ Lymond said.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

42. “Something comes out of every voyage,’ said the other man sharply. ‘Out of every bloody fruitless endeavour. All the striving after the unknowable. The unattainable, the search for Athor, the creative force, rolled into a circle. You with your quest; I with my care-ridden Emperor; Sir Thomas, sitting before the fire, his bowels burning before him. We add something. If we didn’t add something, there would be no object in it.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

43. “I have lost you before I have found you.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

44. “Francis Crawford’s face in this fleeting moment of privacy was filled with ungovernable feeling: of shock and of pain and of a desire beyond bearing: the desire of the hart which longs for the waterbrook, and does not know, until it sees the pool under the trees, for what it has thirsted.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

45. “My love is given to no one,’ said Lymond. ‘To neither man, woman or child. Duty, friendship, compassion I do owe to many. But love I offer to none.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

46. “Lack of genius never held anyone back. Only time wasted on resentment and daydreaming can do that.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

47. “Oh, ye’ve a temper,’ said Archie consideringly. ‘And ye had a rare old time losing it, and ye were like enough justified at that. But take a thought, too. Are ye to accuse Graham Malett in the law courts from the flat o’ a bier-claith, or on two sticks like a wife wi’ Arthretica? If ye’re tae walk upright like the fine, testy gentleman ye are, ye’ll need some nursing, I’d say. So I fear Guthrie and I had best bide.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

48. “I can live alone, but it is better to have someone else to concern oneself with; to help and be helped by. There is nothing so strong as a family.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

49. “Intentions, yours or anyone else’s, don’t matter; they never matter and never excuse: get that into your head.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

50. “Strophe and counterstrophe reached their epode.”

— Dorothy Dunnett