The Skystone Quotes

“Magic, after all, is no more than the product of knowledge others don’t share.”
― Jack Whyte, The Skystone

“Square wheels are hard to sell”
― Jack Whyte, The Skystone

“My admiration for Britannicus grew as I watched the uncomplaining manner in which he accepted the injustice and the inefficiency and inconvenience being heaped upon him by incompetent superiors.”
― Jack Whyte, The Skystone

“There has to be something produced before anyone can consume it, and I believe no man has a right to live if he does not produce something. Parasites are destructive. Yet our society, our Roman state, has never seen any need to encourage its people to produce sensibly or to govern their own production! That’s all I’m going to say. Otherwise I’ll get angry.”
― Jack Whyte, The Skystone

“They are ordinary but courageous people who decided they could not continue to live under the Empire's rules, even then."

I frowned. "For example?"

"Examples? Try crippling taxes, unjust and self-serving laws, constant inflation, corrupt officials, restrictive regulations governing the way they lived their lives and constant government interference."

I had nothing to say to this, so he continued. "They walked away — out of the Empire. Away from their homes, from their businesses, from their employment. Away from the taxes and the duties and the burdens. They walked away to the hills and the forests and they refused to go back. They built huts and they lived on whatever they could grow and hunt for themselves." His voice was almost a monotone. "It started as a trickle at the end of the third century and it grew into a flood. We're now at the end of the fourth century and it's still going on. For over a hundred years now these Bagaudae have paid no taxes, obeyed no Roman laws and spared the lives of no Roman soldiers who came after them. Most of them live communally on huge villa farms and settlements. Each man contributes to the life of the commune with his own skills and abilities. They have no use for money; they barter. And among their numbers are physicians, magistrates, architects, lawyers, administrators and a large number of professional soldiers."

"That's incredible, " I said. "And the Empire does nothing?" He spread his hands wide in a gesture that was purely Gallic. "What can the Empire do? The bureaucrats are afraid that the story will spread. The official policy is to do nothing that will attract attention to the problem. To ignore it, in the hope that it will go away. Rome leaves the Bagaudae in peace, because the alternative might stir up a furore that could breed an Empire full of Bagaudae."
- The Skystone”
― Jack Whyte, The Skystone

“The wind that seemed to blow endlessly from the north at this time of year had a malevolence, a concentrated hostility, that made it different from any other wind in the world. It came buffeting and blistering south out of the hills, its force twisted and compressed by their contours, and slapped hard against the fifteen-foot-high surface of the Wall, to be sucked down like cataract water into the ten-foot ditch below and then spewed back up and over and between the battlements with an erratic violence that could panic a man by snatching the air out of his mouth as he tried to breathe.”
― Jack Whyte, The Skystone