We don’t build,’ I said to my son, ‘we just destroy.
BERNARD CORNWELLYou know what circumcision is, Private?
More Bernard Cornwell Quotes
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We make children and wealth and amass land and build halls and assemble armies and give great feasts, but only one thing survives us. Reputation.
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Know that their voice can make your heart miss a beat and that their company is all your happiness can ever desire and that their absence will leave your soul alone, bereft and lost.
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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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I do understand that you can look into someone’s eyes,” I heard myself saying, “and suddenly know that life will be impossible without them.
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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.
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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.
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Love is a dangerous thing. It comes in disguise to change our life… Lust is the deceiver. Lust wrenches our lives until nothing matters except the one we think we love, and under that deceptive spell we kill for them, give all for them, and then, when we have what we have wanted.
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You know what circumcision is, Private?
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If you understand everything,’ I said carefully, ‘then there’s no room left for magic. It’s only when you’re lost and frightened and in the dark that you call on the Gods, and they like us to call on them. It makes them feel powerful, and that’s why they like us to live in chaos.
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You won’t regret the men you never killed, but you will regret the women you passed up.
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Writing is a solitary occupation.
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You’ll call me damned Jew, a Christ murderer, a secret worshipper of pigs and a kidnapper of Christian children. How absurd! Who would want to kidnap children, Christian or otherwise? Vile things.
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But when you have order, you don’t need Gods. When everything is well ordered and disciplined then nothing is unexpected.
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Because there could not be peace, not while two tribes shared one land. One tribe must win.
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The only mercy of children is that they grow up, as my son has but then, tragically, they beget more children. We do not learn life’s lessons.
BERNARD CORNWELL