Rafael Sabatini

"He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad."

"Bestir, ladies! To your chaise, and see that you contrive to look your best. Soon the eyes of Guichen will be upon you, and the condition of your interior to-morrow will depend upon the impression made by your exterior to-day."

"You have changed a certainty into a possibility, and I hate possibilities — God of God! I have lived on possibilities, and infernally near starved on them."

"They opposed brute force to reason and philosophy, and battalions of foreign mercenaries to ideas. As if ideas were to be impaled on bayonets!"

"When we know all of whatever it may be, we can never do anything but forgive, madame. That is the profoundest religious truth that was ever written. It contains, in fact, a whole religion—the noblest religion any man could have to guide him."

"Mr Pollexfen was at one and the same time right and wrong—a condition much more common than is generally supposed."

""Sir!" she checked him. "I think you are talking treason." "I hope I am not obscure," said he."

"It was heroic!" "Heroic, is it? Bedad, it's epic! Ye begin to perceive the breadth and depth of my genius."