Flashman at the Charge Quotes

“The advantage to being a wicked bastard is that everyone pesters the Lord on your behalf; if volume of prayers from my saintly enemies means anything, I'll be saved when the Archbishop of Canterbury is damned. It's a comforting thought.”
― George MacDonald Fraser, Flashman at the Charge

“I know my Easts and Tom Brown, you see, and they're never happy unless their morality is being tried in the furnace and they can feel they are doing the right Christian thing and never mind the consequences to anyone else.”
― George MacDonald Fraser, Flashman at the Charge

“It ain't always easy, if your knees knock as hard as mine, but you must remember the golden rule: when the game's going against you, stay calm—and cheat.”
― George MacDonald Fraser, Flashman at the Charge

“It’s always the same before the shooting begins—the hostesses go into a frenzy of gaiety, and all the spongers and civilians crawl out of the wainscoting braying with good fellowship because thank God they ain’t going, and the young plungers and green striplings roister it up, and their fiancées let ’em pleasure them red in the face out of pity, because the poor brave boy is off to the cannon’s mouth, and the dance goes on and the eyes grow brighter and the laughter shriller—and the older men in their dress uniforms look tired, and sip their punch by the fireplace and don’t say much at all.”
― George MacDonald Fraser, Flashman at the Charge

“If it is an offence against God, against the Church, against the law—I am a Cossack, and we were here before God or the Church or the law!”
― George MacDonald Fraser, Flashman at the Charge

“That’s why I’m eighty years old today, while Scud East has been mouldering underground at Cawnpore this forty-odd years.”
― George MacDonald Fraser, Flashman at the Charge: The classic compelling historical adventure fiction novel

“For the rest, he had gingerish, curling hair and a square, masterful face that was no way impaired by a badly-broken nose. He looked tough, and immensely self-assured; it was in his glance, in the abrupt way he moved, in the slant of the long cigarette between his fingers, in the rakish tilt of his peaked cap, in the immaculate white tunic of the Imperial Guards. He was the kind who knew exactly what was what, where everything was, and precisely who was who—especially himself. He was probably a devil with women, admired by his superiors, hated by his rivals, and abjectly feared by his subordinates. One word summed him up: bastard.”
― George MacDonald Fraser, Flashman at the Charge

“it wasn't that I'd grown any braver as I got older - the reverse if anything”
― George MacDonald Fraser, Flashman at the Charge

“By God, I wish that spit had been a real one, with me to turn it.”
― George MacDonald Fraser, Flashman at the Charge