He just killed them

That was the folly of it; no sense, no logic, no reason, and the lousy bastard didn’t enjoy it or care. He just killed them, and I watched and marvelled, and found myself hoping that Arnold was right, and there was a Hell for him.


Flashman on the March, p.231, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2005.


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Carnal intent, hurrah!

      The discovery that you've been sold a pup is always disconcerting, but your reaction depends on age and experience. In infancy you burst into tears and smash something; in adolescence you may be bewildered (as I was when Lady Geraldine lured me into the long grass on flase pretence and then set about me with carnal intent, hurrah!); in riper manhood common sense usually tells you to bolt, which was my instinct on the Pearl River when I learned that my lorcha was carrying not opium, as I'd supposed, but guns for the Taiping rebels. But at sixty-one your brain works faster than your legs, so you reflect, and as often as not reach the right answer by intuition as well as reason.

Flashman and the Tiger, p.134, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2000.

 
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Hard as a hammer

. . .he listened with his bare forearms set on the table, John Bull to the life; he’d be fifty years then, the Big Barbarian, as the Chinese called him, bald as an egg save for a few little white wisps, with his bulldog lip and sudden barks of anger or laughter. A peppery old buffer, and a deal kinder than he looked — how many ambassadors would call on a colonel’s wife to carry a letter to her man? — and the shrewdest diplomat of his day, hard as a hammer and subtle as a Spaniard. Best of all he had common sense.


Flashman and the Dragon, p.162, Fontana Paperback edition, 1986.



Tags: Flashman, Flashman quotes, diplomat.