Rosemary Sutcliff Quotes

“Looking back across the years, Marcus remembered that his father’s eyes had been very bright, like the eyes of a man going into action; and the light had caught suddenly in the great flawed emerald of the signet-ring he always wore. ”

“Marcus went to look. The sound of the hunter’s voice and a horse’s soft whinny gave him his direction, and making his way between the wood-pile and a tethered cock whose feathers shone with metallic colours among the duller hens, he reached the doorway of a stable hut, and looked in.”

“Before many days had passed, Marcus had slipped so completely into the life of the frontier fort that it seemed as though he had never known any other. The plan of the Roman forts was much of the same. ”

“Marcus’s hope of seeing the lost legion re-established is dashed, but he is able to bring back the gilded bronze eagle so that it can no longer serve as a symbol of Roman defeat – and thus will no longer be a danger to the frontier’s security.”

“Discharged because of a battle wound that has left him lame in one leg, a young Roman officer Marcus Flavius Aquila tries to discover the truth about the disappearance of his father’s legion in northern Britain. ”

“Disguised as a Greek oculist and traveling beyond Hadrian’s Wall with his freed ex-slave, the British native hunter Esca, Marcus finds that a demoralized and mutinous Ninth Legion was annihilated by a great rising of the northern tribes.”

″ In part, this disgrace was redeemed through a heroic last stand by a small remnant (including Marcus’s father) around the legion’s eagle standard. ”

“Rewarded by Rome for his services, he decides to settle as a landowner and farmer in Britain with his British wife, Cottia, and his freed friend, Esca.”

“Centurion Marcus Flavius Aquila had seen little of the Eagles until a year ago. His first ten years had been lived quietly with his mother on the family farm near Clusium, while his father soldiered in Judaea, in Egypt, and here in Britain.”

“in the little silence that had fallen between them, Marcus looked around him at the austere room in the yellow flood of lamplight, and to him it seemed beautiful.”

“Randal lay on his back, lapping up the sunshine until he felt that it was pouring right through him so that if he got up he would have no shadow.”

“Hugh Goch’s face was white and thin under the flame of his hair, long-boned and almost delicate, but his eyes were the cold, inhuman, gold-rimmed eyes of a bird of prey, and looking into them, Randal was more afraid than he had ever been in his life before.”

“If I can keep out of his way for a few days, he’ll forget all about it. And he did laugh- afterwards. Maybe he wasn’t so very angry after all, maybe it was just the sun that made his eyes look like that.”

“But to kill for the sake of killing is the way of the weasel and the fox, and the hunter who kills so angers the Forest Gods.”

“All his life, Randal was able to remember that scene in its every last detail, the torch making a ragged core of light in the heart of the crowding gloom, and in it, the intent faces of the two men, and their intent hands, and between them, on the magpie-chequer of the board, the two armies of fantastic shapes that marched and pranced and wavered to and fro...”

“He was nine years old now, going on ten, and officially a dog-boy, but in actual fact just something of a no account, to be kicked by anyone who felt like kicking, and plenty of people did.”

″...in that instant, as the new Lord reined back a little, looking up at his inheritance, the thing happened. A very small thing, but it was to change Randal’s whole life. He dropped the half-eaten fig.”

“The gadfly that stings my wrist means no harm, I break it under my thumbnail, none the less.”

“There was red wool on his mother’s weaving-rod now, the true burning Warrior Scarlet that was the very color of courage itself.”

“If the thing is worth a fight, fight for it and do not hear the Grandfather too clearly.”

“Men call me Talore One-Hand as often as Talore the Hunter, yet no man has ever questioned my right to the scarlet.”

″‘Don’t run!’ But terror had him in its power, and he was running, with no more sense of direction than a mouse with a stoat behind it.”

″‘You have something there- an ill behaved puppy- that belongs to me. Pray you hand it over to my squire, for training.’ And the lazy voice replied, faintly drawling, ‘Let the Lord of Arundel forgive me, I fear I am something too busy.‘”

“I grow old but I can still count the tally of my ten fingers. Two grandsons there are at the hearth fire; but a grandson at the hearth fire is not a grandson among the spear-warriors of the Tribe.”

“There are ways- ways round, and ways through, and ways over. If you have not two hands for a bow, then learn to use a throw-spear with such skill that your enemies, and your brothers, forget that it is not from choice.”

“Sometimes I wish that I had been born to the Men’s side; sometimes I grow weary of the spinning and the weaving and the grinding corn.”

″Lord of the Sun! That I should have a grandson herding sheep! I, who have been such a warrior as men speak of round the fire for a hundred winters!”

“Blindly, instinctively, he turned to the wilderness, like any small desperately hurt animal seeking solitude from its own kind and the dark and a hole to crawl into.”