Lindsey Davis Quotes

If being hit on the head by a falling flower tub could be worth cash to the victim, what price a child’s life under civil law?

I like my women in a few wisps of drapery: then I can hope for a chance to remove the wisps. If they start out with nothing I tend to get depressed because either they have just stripped off for someone else or, in my line of work, they are usually dead.

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

'Do you want a cretin or a meddler?'
'Which is better for us?'
'Whoever gets the larger backhander.'
'We won't pay. We are going for probity.'
'Can't afford true justice, eh?'

In an ideal world I ought to have gone with him to observe their reactions, but in an ideal world heroes never get tired or depressed; what's more, heroes are paid more than me.

Never stop to breathe the pretty flower scents. The graves of the poor still stink.

It struck me there might be a reason why Helena Justina whipped along at such a cracking pace: she did not want to be stuck in the wilderness with my corpse. I thanked Jove for her ruthless good sense. I did not want my corpse to be stuck with her in any case.

[Y]ou would think happy wedding guests would tuck in with gusto—yet ... [i]t’s mourners at funerals who scoff.” “Because this is food as human comfort, plus respect for the national gods. We are one with our ancestors and one with our fellow mourners.

He wore the purple; it was his entitlement. With it he had neither wreath nor jewels. For him the best adornment of rank was acute native intelligence.

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

To know another person's fortune smacks of wanting to control their fate for the wrong reasons.

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.

They were not beggars; well, not in the usual sense. They were Christians, who wanted not just my nephews' money but their souls.

This was no more cynical than most lying lozenge-pushers, but when he thought it mattered, Rhoemetalces had been honest. We cannot have that. Rome is a complex, sophisticated society. Truth is distrusted as much as Greek philosophy.