Nobody puts Flashy in the corner

      “Now you know the kind of woman you married. And if you spurn me it will break my heart — but I would do it again, a thousand times!” I’ll swear she gritted her teeth. “No one — no one! speaks ill of my hero, and that’s the size of it!”


Flashman and the Tiger, p.263, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2000.


Tags: Flashman, Flashman quotes, spurn.

Don't mend as quickly

           When you’re past the fifty mark, you don’t mend as quickly as you used to. For on thing, you don’t want to; where once on a day you couldn’t wait to be off your sick-bed rampaging about, you’re now content to lie still and let any handy ministering angel do their stuff. When I was a brat of a boy I went through hot hell in Afghanistan, had a fort collapse on me, and broke my thigh—a few weeks later I was fit enough to gallop an Afghan wench with my leg in a splint and old Avitabile egging me on, and get beastly drunk afterwards. Not at fifty-three; if they’d paraded the Folies Bergère past me a month after Little Bighorn I’d have asked for bread and milk instead, and damn little of that in case it over-excited me.

Flashman and the Redskins, pp.330-31, Pan Books edition, 1983.

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Where's Flashman?

…it looked very gallant, and has since been commemorated in oils, with camels and niggers* looking on admiringly, and the Chiefs all shaking hands. (I’m there too, like John the Baptist on horseback, with one aimless hand up in the air, which is rot, because at the time I was squatting in the latrine working the dysentery bugs out of my system and wishing I was dead.)

Flashman in the Great Game, p.261, Pan edition, 4th printing, 1979.

*Flashman's use of racial epitahs is a continuing problem for more enlightened, contemporary readers. The inclusion of these passages should not be taken as tacit support of his misanthropic, 19th century view of race relations.

Ill thoughts and spit

‘Let the ill think ill,’ says I easily. ‘The spittle of a durwan* will not drown a soldier.’

* Door-keeper.

Flashman in the Great Game, p.74, Pan edition, 4th printing, 1979.

Tags:
Flashman, Flashman quotes,soldier, spittle.