"Oh, for gods' sake, Severus. This is a woman we're talking about! Soft, squidgy, half a brain... [Agrippina clears her throat] Yes, right, mother, present company excepted."

"Look at them. They're fighting this war to save their people. To keep their right to their own land. To preserve their religion and their right to practice it. And we're fighting it because... we're here, because it's our job... professional pride, really. Not enough, is it?"

"[last words] That was the beginning of her story, Isolda, my daughter. And no one will ever hear it. Because we don't write our stories down. We live them."

"All men die, Isolda. All women, too. Our lives are over in a moment, like a bird that flies out of the darkness into a bright hall full of light and noise and merriment, then out again into the darkness of eternity. But in that moment, we can do great things. We can make ourselves remembered forever. And by all the gods, we will!"

"Romans, you are damned. You have wakened the terrible anger of our gods and ancestors, and they will show you no mercy. We will crush your bones into the land you have desecrated. We will slit your veins and watch the blood burst from you and shower down upon our soil. We will swallow you up, and our strong green shoots will spring to life where you once stood. See your gods tremble and fall before the wrath of Boudica!"

"Our people are poets. When Dervalloc speaks of killing, he means using reason to defeat your arguments. When he speaks of sending you home in pieces, he means something quite harmless, I'm sure."

"Interrogator: What is between you and Osama bin Laden?"

"Liam Redmond - Old Brady"

"Frank Middlemass - Sir Charles Lyndon"

"Arthur O'Sullivan - Captain Feeny"

"Leonard Rossiter - Captain Quin"

"Godfrey Quigley - Captain Grogan"

"Philip Stone - Graham"

"Steven Berkoff - Lord Ludd"

"Gay Hamilton - Nora Brady"

"Hardy Krüger - Captain Potzdorf"

"Patrick Magee - The Chevalier"

"Marisa Berenson - Lady Lyndon"

"Ryan O'Neal - Redmond Barry"

"After reaching the top, where can you go -- except down?"

"Let those laugh that win...while they can laugh and do win."

"Great was his rise -- and much greater his fall."

"Upstart. Soldier. Hero. Deserter. Scoundrel. Opportunist. Family man. Adulterer. Ruffian. Pariah. Victim."

"The tale of a rogue who conned his way to the top...and back again."

"In the 18th Century, it takes much guile for an Irish lad without prospects to win the prestige and privileges of English nobility. It takes far more than guile to avoid losing them."

"B-brave. A-acknowledging. R-resilient. R-reckless. Y-yielding. L-lovelorn. Y-yearning. N-noble. D-deceptive. O-ominous. N-narcissistic."

"(EPILOGUE) It was in the reign of George III that the aforesaid personages lived and quarreled; Good or bad, handsome or ugly, rich or poor, they are all equal now."

"(final lines) Utterly baffled and beaten, what was the lonely and broken-hearted man to do? He took the annuity and returned to Ireland with his mother to complete his recovery. Sometime later he travelled to the Continent. His life there, we have not the means of following accurately. But he appears to have resumed his former profession of a gambler without his former success. He never saw Lady Lyndon again."

"Barry had his faults, but no man could say of him that he was not a good and tender father. He loved his son with a blind partiality. He denied him nothing. It is impossible to convey what high hopes he had for the boy and how he indulged in a thousand fond anticipations as to his future success and figure in the world. But fate had determined that he should leave none of his race behind him, and that he should finish his life poor, lonely, and childless."

"Now all the bills came down on him together. All the bills he had been contracting for the years of his marriage and which the creditors sent in with a hasty unanimity. Their amount was frightful. Barry was now bound up in an inextricable toil of bills and debts, of mortgages and insurances, and in all the evils attendant upon them. And Lady Lyndon's income was hampered almost irretrievably to satisfy these claims."

"If he had murdered Lord Bullingdon, Barry could hardly be received with greater contempt and coldness than what now followed him in town and country. His friends fell away from him. And a legend arose of his cruelty to his stepson."

"Barry was born clever enough at gaining a fortune, but incapable of keeping one. For the qualities and energies which lead a man to triumph in the former case are often the very cause of his undoing in the latter."

"Five years in the army, and some considerable experience of the world, had by now dispelled any of those romantic notions regarding love with which Barry commenced life. And he began to have it in mind, as so many gentlemen had done before him, to marry a woman of fortune and condition. And, as such things so often happen, these thoughts closely coincided with his setting first sight upon a lady who will henceforth play a considerable part in the drama of his life: the Countess of Lyndon, Viscountess Bullingdon of England, Baroness of Castle Lyndon of the Kingdom of Ireland, a woman of vast wealth and great beauty. She was the wife of The Right Honourable Sir Charles Reginald Lyndon, Knight of the Bath, and Minister to George III at several of the smaller Courts of Europe, a cripple, wheeled about in a chair, worn out by gout and a myriad of diseases. Her Ladyship's Chaplain, Mr. Runt, acted in the capacity of tutor to her son, the little Viscount Bullingdon, a melancholy little boy, much attached to his mother."