Dorothy Dunnett said this quote

Only eight months had gone since Henry VIII of England had been suspended in death, there to lie like Mohammed’s coffin, hardly in the Church nor out of it, attended by his martyrs and the acidulous fivefold ghosts of his wives. King Francis of France, stranded by his neighbour’s death in the midst of a policy so advanced, so brilliant and so intricate that it should at last batter England to the ground, and be damned to the best legs in Europe—Francis, bereft of these sweet pleasures, dwindled and died likewise.

~ Dorothy Dunnett

Words is but wind but dunts is the devil

~ Dorothy Dunnett

And habits are hell's own substitute for good intentions. Habits are the ruin of ambition, of initiative , of imagination. They're the curse of marriage and the after-bane of death.

~ Dorothy Dunnett

I don't like this war. I don't like the cold-blooded scheming at the beginning and the carnage at the end and the grumbling and the jealousies and the pettishness in the middle. I hate the lack of gallantry and grace, the self-seeking, the destruction of valuable people and things. I believe in danger and endeavor as a form of tempering but I reject it if this is the only shape it can take.

~ Dorothy Dunnett