Facts are the soil from which the story grows. Imagination is a last resort.

- Dorothy Dunnett

Music, the knife without a hilt.

- Dorothy Dunnett

And the English army, wheeling, started south at a gallop over the hill pass into Ettrick, followed by twenty men and eight hundred sheep in steel he…

- Dorothy Dunnett

Lack of genius never held anyone back. Only time wasted on resentment and daydreaming can do that.

- Dorothy Dunnett

Today,’ said Lymond, ‘if you must know, I don’t like living at all. But that’s just immaturity boggling at the sad face of failure. Tomorrow I’ll be …

- Dorothy Dunnett

The coast's a jungle of Moors, Turks, Jews, renegades from all over Europe, sitting in palaces built from the sale of Christian slaves. There are twe…

- 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 marri…

- Dorothy Dunnett

My son took many years to learn the simple truth. You cannot love any one person adequately until you have made friends with the rest of the human ra…

- Dorothy Dunnett

But I despised men who accepted their fate. I shaped mine twenty times and had it broken twenty times in my hands.

- Dorothy Dunnett