The Archer's Tale Quotes

“You'll call me a damned Jew, a Christ murderer, a secret worshipper of pigs and a kidnapper of christian children.” This was all said cheerfully. “How absurd! Who would want to kidnap children, Christian or otherwise? Vile things. 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, The Archer's Tale

“Robin Hood’s Lament”?’ Every archer knew that tune.”
― Bernard Cornwell, The Archer's Tale

“Calix meus inebrians.”
― Bernard Cornwell, The Archer's Tale

“Pelos ossos de Deus, Tom, o diabo fez um serviço ruim quando trepou com sua mãe.”
― Bernard Cornwell, The Archer's Tale

“The wheel of fortune that had once raised her so high had taken her into the utter depths.”
― Bernard Cornwell, Harlequin

“Be mad enough, his father once said, and they will either lock you away or make you a saint.”
― Bernard Cornwell, The Archer's Tale

“Harlequin, probably derived from the old French Hellequin: a troop of the devil’s horsemen.”
― Bernard Cornwell, The Archer's Tale

“O mundo está apodrecendo. A Igreja é corrupta e os reis são fracos. Cabe a nós fazer um mundo novo, amado por Deus, mas para fazê-lo temos de destruir o velho. Temos de tomar o poder e depois dar o poder a Deus. É por isso que estamos lutando.”
― Bernard Cornwell, The Archer's Tale

“Merchants,” the Duke said, “have no loyalties other than to money. They have no honor. Honor is not learned, madame. It is bred. Just as you breed a horse for bravery and speed, or a hound for agility and ferocity, so you breed a nobleman for honor.”
― Bernard Cornwell, The Archer's Tale

“Guinefort had been a dog and, so far as Thomas’s father knew, the only animal ever to be canonized. The beast had saved a baby from a wolf, then been martyred by his owner, who thought the dog had eaten the baby when in truth he had hidden it beneath the cot.”
― Bernard Cornwell, The Archer's Tale

“The hellequin,” she said icily, “are the dead who have no souls. The dead who were so wicked in life that the devil loves them too much to punish them in hell and so he gives them his horses and releases them on the living.”
― Bernard Cornwell, The Archer's Tale

“Put a cat to watch a flock and the wolves eat well.”
― Bernard Cornwell, Harlequin

“You Christians,” he had said, “insist that prophets tell the future, but that wasn’t really what they did at all. They warned Israel. They told us that we would be visited by death, destruction and horror if we did not mend our ways. They were preachers, Thomas, just preachers, though, God knows, they were right about the death, destruction and horror.”
― Bernard Cornwell, The Archer's Tale

“Be mad enough, his father had once said, and they will either lock you away or make you a saint.”
― Bernard Cornwell, The Archer's Tale

“If God is within us then we need no Church and no Holy Father to lead us to His mercy, and that notion is the most pernicious of heresies”
― Bernard Cornwell, The Archer's Tale

“were in the camp, given a day’s rest after leading the last failed assault. Will Skeat hated failure.”
― Bernard Cornwell, The Archer's Tale

“I have never asked you for anything.” “But what would you have asked for?” She stared into the ripples of the stream. “What you gave me,” she said after a while, “kindness.” “Nothing else?” She paused. “I would have liked to call you Father.”
― Bernard Cornwell, The Archer's Tale

“I can unbutton your breeches and I can point you down wind, but even with the Good Lord’s help I can’t piss for you.”
― Bernard Cornwell, The Archer's Tale

“Fighting fair! Whoever heard of anything so daft? Fight fair and you lose.”
― Bernard Cornwell, The Archer's Tale

“Soldiers were not paragons; they were scarred, vicious men who took delight in destruction.”
― Bernard Cornwell, The Archer's Tale

“Put a cat to guard the sheep and the wolves would eat well.”
― Bernard Cornwell, The Archer's Tale

“Where’s your bowstrings?’ Thomas asked, for the priest had neither helmet nor cap.
‘I looped them round my…well, never mind. It has to be good for something other than pissing, eh? And it’s dry down there.’ Father Hobbe seemed indecently cheerful.”
― Bernard Cornwell, The Archer's Tale

“Father Hobbe, his cassock skirts hitched up to his waist, was fighting with a quarterstaff, ramming the pole into French faces. ‘In the name of the Father,’ he shouted, and a Frenchman reeled back with a pulped eye, ‘and of the Son,’ Father Hobbe snarled as he broke a man’s nose, ‘and of the Holy Ghost!”
― Bernard Cornwell, The Archer's Tale

“An English man-at-arms had his helmet split open and his skull with it, so that he rode wavering from the fight, blood pouring down his mail coat. His horse stopped a few paces from the turmoil and the man-at-arms slowly, so slowly, bent forward and then slumped down from his saddle. One foot was trapped in a stirrup as he died but his horse did not seem to notice. It just went on cropping the grass.”
― Bernard Cornwell, The Archer's Tale

“St George!’ the English shouted, but the saint must have been sleeping for he gave the attackers no help.”
― Bernard Cornwell, The Archer's Tale

“They’re praying to ham bones, ham bones! The blessed pig!”
― Bernard Cornwell, The Archer's Tale

“Nondum amabam, et amare amabam.
(No amé, pero anhelaba amar)”
― Bernard Cornwell, The Archer's Tale

“Only a fool leaves cash where a servant can find it,' he said.”
― Bernard Cornwell, The Archer's Tale

“Remember the old saying, my lady,” he said slyly. “Put a cat to watch a flock and the wolves eat well.”
― Bernard Cornwell, The Archer's Tale