Lindsey Davis Quotes

Think of tonight as having a real purpose. Yes, it is dining with the dead in order to be at one with our ancestors, but at the same time, a good scoff in shared company provides solace for the unhappy, it anneals the internal stress of bereavement, it helps the living along the path of their recovery from grief.” “That’s a useful motto for a caterer!

I despise women who rely on men entirely for their own existence.

To be born with nothing was grim. But to be born with everything, then to lose it, was far more cruel.

You're not bloody Aristophanes, and the people who are paying for tickets are not educated Athenians. We're acting for turnips who only come to talk to their cousins and fart. We have to give them a lot of action and low-level jokes, but you can leave all that to us on stage. We know what's required. Your job is to hone the basic framework and remember the simple motto: short speeches, short lines, short words.

He was dead. No point speculating. Cherish the past for what it was, an ideal, a signal that human happiness might be a possibility. Raise your standards. Make a decent life, Lucilla. Life is all there is. If it's only once, it must be good... He had been right. If perfection only happened once, that was better than never. Now nothing for her would ever again entail complete despair. So thank you, Gaius Vinius Clodianus, son of Marcus, thank you for your good deed, a deed that brightened somebody's dark world.

Their work was undercover—yet their existence unconcealed. That is how fear works.

Some men are born lucky. Others are born Marcus Didius Falco.

Sometimes information you barely noticed consciously comes back to you of its own accord.

In my experience, men who sit in corners are the ones to watch.

Love and death are gritty subjects. Their appropriate handling by poets does not require myrtle petals and violets.

The world is full of people slandering their birthplaces, as if they really believe that small-town life is different elsewhere.

Curiosity is a terrible inducement.

'How old now?'
'Thirty. Downhill to the dark boat across the Styx. Probably be sick over the side in Charon's ferry too…'

I would rather see Rome ruled by a man who once had to ask his accountant tricky questions before his steward could pay the butcher’s bill than by some mad limb like Nero, who was brought up believing himself the son and the grandson of gods, and who thought wearing the purple gave him free rein to indulge his personal vanities, execute real talent, bankrupt the Treasury, burn half of Rome – and bore the living daylights out of paying customers in theatres!

Stick with it, Xanthus. There are fortunes to be made out of bristle for a man with deft hands.