45 Quotes by Rosemary Sutcliff

If we break faith with thee, may the green earth gape and swallow us, may the grey seas break in and overwhelm us, may the sky of stars fall and crush us out of life for ever.

I have a special “ah, here I am again, I know exactly what they are going to have for breakfast” feeling when I get back into Roman Britain, which is very nice.

And it came to Marcus suddenly that slaves very seldom whistled. They might sing, if they felt like it or if the rhythm helped their work, but whistling was in some way different; it took a free man to make the sort of noise Esca was making.

The young Centurion, who had been completely still throughout, said very softly, as though to himself, “Greater love hath no man – ” and Justin thought it sounded as though he were quoting someone else.

But tonight, because Rome had fallen and Felix was dead, because of Valerius’s shame, the empty hut seemed horribly lonely, and there was a small aching need in him for somebody to notice, even if they were not glad, that he had come home.

I do not think that you can be changing the end of a song or a story like that, as though it were quite separate from the rest. I think the end of a story is part of it from the beginning.

I sometimes think that we stand at sunset,′ Eugenus said after a pause. ‘It may be that the night will come close over us in the end, but I believe that morning will come again. Morning always grows again out of the darkness, though maybe not for the people who saw the sun go down. We are the Lantern Bearers, my friend; for us to keep something burning, to carry what light we can forward into the darkness and the wind.

Presently I went back to my Companions, and slept under the apple trees, wrapped in my cloak and with my head on Cabal’s flank for a pillow. There is no pillow in the world so good as a hound’s flank.

And out of Tristan’s heart there grew a hazel tree, and out of Iseult’s a honeysuckle, and they arched together and clung and intertwined so that they could never be separated anymore.