Trust to luck

      There's a moment, and I've faced it more often than I care to remember, when you're rat-in-the-corner, all your wriggling and lying and imploring have failed, there's nowhere to run, and your only hope is to do your damnedest and trust to luck and every dirty dodge you know.


Flashman and the Tiger, p.148, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2000.


Tags: Flashman, Flashman quotes, luck.

The Flashman gambit

      “I'll be jiggered!” cries he. “It's the Flashman gambit . . . grovel and whine — then strike when your man's off guard!”


Flashman and the Tiger, p.148, Harper Collins, paperback edition 2000.


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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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Bakery admonishment

Of all the cake-headed tricks...

Flashman and the Redskins, p.246, Pan Books edition, 1983.

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Fiery warmth

Then they presented me with a flask of schnapps, and I sent half of it down my throat at once, and felt the fiery warmth running back along my limbs. I poured a little into my palm and rubbed it on my face and neck – a trick Mackenzie taught me in Afghanistan; nothing like it for the cold, if you can spare the liquor.

Royal Flash, p.235, Pan edition, 8th printing, 1978.

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Flashman, Flashman quotes,schnapps.