Top 150 Dorothy Dunnett Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “It isn’t that music doesn’t matter: the reverse, as it happens. So my defences against it are very strong. Can you understand that?”

— Dorothy Dunnett

102. “The prospect of watching the Crawford family at grips with itself was something that, blissfully, he wanted very much for his birthday.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

103. “Your blasted Nanny should have taught you what mine did,’ said Lymond. ‘The things you enjoy most aren’t good for you.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

104. “One battle in twelve might be won by a brilliant military stratagem. The rest stood or fell by somebody’s blunders. Only rarely, there came the feel of a great campaign evolved by a stylist: imaginative, comprehensive, irresistible.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

105. “I have only to dismount, and be sick, and then I am, as ever, your man.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

106. “Our powder and arrows are going to run out on us some time. And so are our food and water and joie de vivre and good books and everything. Why not walk out now and get made into somebody’s favourite slave?”

— Dorothy Dunnett

107. “What to do when attacked at sea, lessons one to ten. They had spent their first morning at sea being trained, remorselessly, by Francis Crawford for this precise event. ‘I know what to do,’ said Philippa. ‘Offer them the raspberry wine and keep them talking till Mother comes in.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

108. “A smile, bracketing his still mouth, spread like bane over Lymond’s pale face.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

109. “Five years ago your brother Lymond was found to have been selling his own country for years: he’s been kicked from land to land committing every crime on the calendar and now he’s back here, God forgive him, with filthier habits and a nastier mind than he set out with.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

110. “Here you have a hawk of the lure, not of the fist. He will not come to you. If you would have him, you must lay your heart upon your hawking-glove; and feed it to him.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

111. “There have been so many misunderstandings in the past. What you did, often, was done for good reason. I know I am simple. I know you are devious. But, oh God, if there is any good reason for what you are doing now; any excuse; any unknown factor or subtle circumstance you are afraid I can’t grasp, for the mercy of God, this time, tell me.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

112. “I have been taught to face reality: an excellent thing.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

113. “I should hesitate to attribute anything to him at the moment, even principles,’ said Lord Culter, smiling. ‘But you are free to try.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

114. “Lymond’s life was lived on this level: the level on which the future of whole communities could be steered or reshaped, improved or jeopardized by a handful of people.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

115. “There is no one to understand us, except ourselves.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

116. “I have a suggestion in that case,’ said Lymond. ‘You two have the orgy, and I’ll keep the drinker’s headache.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

117. “Every other woman since Eve has asked to be loved more than honour. But not you.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

118. “All the linear delicacy of the boy he had once been stood exposed now in the still, blindfolded face of her son. The clinging yellow hair, orderly on the white linen, was the same silk that had veiled her rings when she had smoothed his pillow in childhood; the cheekbone under the bandage had once, fresh and firm, been pressed to her own; the beautiful hands, lying loose on the damask, belonged to him and also to another man, whom she had placed before all others, and always would.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

119. “It was then that she found that he had laid flat, himself, every defence against her: that she could, if she wished, enter and be received within this, the long-guarded citadel. And so she discovered, fragment by fragment, what he had never told anyone: the inner truth of all those events which, strung together, made up his unruly life.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

120. “It was one of the occasions when Lymond asleep wrecked the peace of mind of more people than Lymond awake.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

121. “What’s wrong? Has Francis been rude? Then you must try to overlook it. I know you wouldn’t think so, but he is thoroughly upset by Tom Erskine’s death; and when Francis is troubled he doesn’t show it, he just goes and makes life wretched for somebody.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

122. “Do you swim? Hunt? Wrestle? I see. Can you use a crossbow? Your longest shot? Can you count? Read and write? Ah, the sting of sarcasm – Have we a scholar here? Then produce us a specimen,” said Lymond. “What about some modest quatrains? Frae vulgar prose to flowand Latin. Deafen us, enchant us, educate us, boy.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

123. “If time allowed, I should be delighted to discuss my private life in every choice particular with all of you, but it really isn’t relevant.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

124. “You lead, therefore you kill.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

125. “One escapes; but one always has to come back. I found too I disliked not being in command of myself.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

126. “He can make you want to knock him down, if he feels like it, by simply saying “good morning”. He possibly said simply “good morning” to Lord Culter. The difference was that, being his brother, Culter hit him.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

127. “I find it so helpful,” continued Lymond, “when some of my gentlemen have well-defined codes of conduct. It makes them more predictable.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

128. “I suppose that was just something you ate; or are you bloody well pregnant as well?”

— Dorothy Dunnett

129. “She got in, as she had persuaded Jerott Blyth to bring her half across France, by force of logic, a kind of flat-chested innocence and the doggedness of a flower-pecker attacking a strangling fig.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

130. “I am saying,’ Lymond said, ’that the bond of race is a deep one, and of a dimension which gives it nobility. I am saying that the salvation of each man’s soul lies within himself, and is not a matter which concerns even his brother.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

131. “Escape into self-destruction by all means; but not until your duty is done.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

132. “We all die,’ said Nostradamus. ‘The man you love. The man who loves you. The man you married. But because of you there will be something, I promise you, by which men will know Francis Crawford has been.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

133. “Leaving him was less like leaving even the most simple of her friends in Flaw Valleys, and more like losing unfinished a manuscript, beautiful, absorbing and difficult, which she had long wanted to read.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

134. “And at thirty-eight a brilliant exponent of arms and a knight of the great fighting and religious Order of St John, the Chevalier de Villegagnon had absolutely no use for common sense himself, but respected it in the laity.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

135. “I don’t change from minute to minute. I don’t change at all.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

136. “His hair soft as a nestling’s, his eyes graceless with malice, Lymond was watching him in a silver mirror.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

137. “It was the only field, so far, in which the Pearl of Fortune had shown any precocity, other than the feat of keeping her head, her reason and her sense of the ridiculous amid conditions of civilized lunacy.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

138. “Lymond ha vuelto.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

139. “A trained fighting man, accustomed to hard words and hard blows and the company of men like himself, for years ruled by the self-discipline required by the world’s greatest order of chivalry, Jerott had come to terms now with the fact that one man could make him feel and act like a rhinoceros in a cloud of mosquitoes.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

140. “I hope,’ said Jerott, breathing softly and hard, ’that you never meet those who will judge what you have done. How would you recognize love? Or compassion? Francis at least has learned that.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

141. “The world is full,’ said Jerott wearily, ’of people who might have wanted to meet Francis Crawford, and who are going to be disappointed.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

142. “Hell’s hell again: the de’il’s back.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

143. “Patriotism,” said Lymond again. “It’s an opulent word, a mighty key to a royal Cloud-Cuckoo-Land. Patriotism; loyalty; a true conviction that of all the troubled and striving world, the soil of one’s fathers is noblest and best. A celestial competition for the best breed of man; a vehicle for shedding boredom and exercising surplus power or surplus talents or surplus money; an immature and bigoted intolerance which becomes the coin of barter in the markets of power – ” Into.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

144. “Bruges was the multiple voice of working water; and the quality of brick-thrown echoes, and the hiss of trees and the flap of drying cloths in the flat-country wind, and the grunting, like frogs in a marsh, of quires of crucified clothes, left to vibrate in the fields of the tenters.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

145. “It won’t be a very good army because it’ll have one eye on the Lothian lairds and one eye on the Douglases. And by God, Richard Crawford,” ended Buccleuch with a growl that lifted the pigeons off the turrets, “if they’ve got to watch you too, there’ll be a wheen of skelly-eyed Scotsmen at the Golden Gates in the next few weeks.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

146. “For spirits one requires a strong head or else a weak brain, and I fear I possess neither.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

147. “She helps everybody... Wait until you are wed. She’ll do your breathing for you.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

148. “I’m tired of training,’ Danny complained. ‘Couldn’t we plunder something, such as decadent idols with emerald eyes and a lot of clean, unspoiled village maidens?”

— Dorothy Dunnett

149. “Then I tell you,” Sybilla said, “that you have no leave to die. Nor have you leave to desert the race you belong to. I want your word that from this moment, you live. You live until no device of priest or leech will hold the web of your body together. And when you walk from this room, you turn your back on France and your face towards the place of your life’s work. I want your oath that you will come back to Scotland.”

— Dorothy Dunnett

150. “I wish to drink to celebrate another proof of something I hold to be true: that what is mathematical is divine, and what is divine is mathematical, and that a transfusion of both creates the flame which is known as beauty.”

— Dorothy Dunnett