Barbed banter was the coin of their realm and heartfelt admissions of affection were rejected out of hand as counterfeit.

Rumors are the easiest of all crops to tend, Richard. You need only sow a few seeds about and in no time at all, you’ll reap a harvest of hatred.

If that’s how you’d rather remember it. But I did not mean that as a reproach. I do not, in truth, think less of you for having the common sense to abandon a ship once waves began to break over the bow. Nor, after sixteen years shut away from the sun, am I likely to find tears to spare for Henry Plantagenet.

Get some sleep. Our troubles will still be there on the morrow.

For whatever reasons – which had never interested him in his youth but which he sometimes pondered as an adult – the Angevin House had always taken Cain and Abel as role models.

Troubles may ofttimes be so dire that they cannot get better. But they are never so dire that they still cannot get worse.

The Welsh were a god-cursed, stiff-necked, and utterly vexatious people, John said bitterly, but they did have an inexplicable ability to rise phoenixlike from the ashes of defeat, to soar upwards on wings too scorched for flight.

But in all honesty, I do not find it so peculiar a notion, that a Welshman should rule Wales.

What is forgiveness worth without trust?

The day that he accused a reigning King of murder was the day he signed his own death warrant, and he knew it.