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Rafael Sabatini

Rafael Sabatini Quotes

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Famous Rafael Sabatini Quotes

“It is not. It has been decided for me. My past decides it. Unless I am to woo in disguise, pretending myself something that I am not. I have killed. I have plundered. I have done dreadful things, unutterable things. I have even amassed some wealth. I own lands, in Jamaica and elsewhere, with plantations and the like. My proper mate among women would be some unfortunate soulless drab who would be indifferent to the source of the money that will support us. I am not so lost – lost though I may be – as to give such a mother to my children. Nor yet am I so lost as to presume to woo any woman of another kind. It is the only honesty remaining me; the last frail link with honour. If that were to snap, then should I be damned, indeed. No, no, sweet lady, whatever I may find to build in the Old World if I reach it, certainly it will not be a family.”

“He was dejected by the sterility of worldly achievement and mourned the futility of all worldly endeavour. In endeavour, itself, as he had to admit from his own experience, there was a certain dynamic entertainment, affording an illusion of useful purpose. With achievement the illusion was dispelled. The purpose grasped was so much water in the hands. Man’s greatest accomplishment was to produce change. Restlessness abode in him none the less because no one state could be shown to be better than another. The only good in life was study, because study was an endeavour that never reached fulfilment. It busied a man to the end of his days, and it aimed at the only true reality in all this world of shams and deceits.”