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.

 
Tags: Flashman, Flashman quotes, brain.

The most awful punishment

“’Twas the most awful punishment anyone could give a child,” says Watson. “Imagine, havin’ to lick your own father! I tell you, Josh, it near broke my heart. Say, didn’t it keep us good, though!”
      It wouldn’t have kept this infant good; I’d have laced the old bugger till his arse fell off. But then, I never had any proper filial regard, and if you’d ever met my guv’nor you’d understand why.


Flashman and the Angel of the Lord, pp.246-47, Harper Collins, 1995.


Tags: Flashman, Flashman quotes, punishment.

The great curse of the new world

…and everywhere the Great Curse of the New World, the American Child, in all its raucous, spoiled, undisciplined, selfish ghastliness, the female specimens keeping up an incessant high-pitched whine and the male infants racketing like cow-pokes on payday. There’s nothing wrong with grown Americans, by and large; you won’t find heartier men or bonnier women anywhere, but the only remedy I can see for their children is to run Herod for President.

Flashman and the Angel of the Lord, pp.142-43, Harper Collins, 1995.


Tags: Flashman, Flashman quotes, children.

Expecting the Spanish Inquisition

…the great terror of my infancy was a lurid coloured print entitled “All Hope Abandon”, purporting to show what happened when the Spanish Inquisition got hold of you — which they undoubtedly would, my nurse assured me, if I didn’t eat my crusts, or farted in Church.

Flashman and the Angel of the Lord, p.117, Harper Collins, 1995.



Tags: Flashman, Flashman quotes, terror.