25 quotes
Defeat the enemy's infantry and the cavalry and gunners had nowhere to hide.
Sharpe's Triumph (1997)
You can keep your sword, for you fought proper. Like a proper soldier. Take your blade to paradise, and tell them you were killed by another proper soldier.
Sharpe's Tiger (1997)
Never in my life have I seen two villages on opposite banks of a river that weren't connected by a ford.
Sharpe's Triumph (1997)
All feared the artillery, coughing its death in fan-like swathes.
Made in Sheffield, and guaranteed never to fail! Good slicer this is, real good. You can cut a man in half with one of these if you get the stroke right.
Sharpe's Triumph (1997)
The redcoats were doing what they did best, what they were paid a shilling a day less stoppages to do: they were killing.
What we should have done, lads, is gone north.
We celebrate kings, we honour great men, we admire aristocrats, we applaud actors, we shower gold on portrait painters and we even, sometimes, reward soldiers, but we always despise merchants.
Sharpe's Tiger (1997)
And he was amazed, as he always was, by the courage of the French. They were being struck hard, yet they stayed.
God had made nothing for the infantry, except a soil easily dug into graves, but the infantry were used to that.
The defenders were hunted down and killed. Even when they tried to surrender, they were killed, for their fortress had resisted and that was the fate of garrisons that showed defiance.
Sharpe's Fortress (1999)
He called my father a traitor, and our family called Revere a traitor, and I rather think we lost the argument.
You know what the trick of a long life is, Sharpe? Stay out of range.
Sharpe's Trafalgar (2000)
Our duty, Richard, is to be decorative and stay alive long enough to be promoted. But no one expects us to be useful! Good God! A junior officer being useful? That'll be the day.
Sharpe's Fortress (1999)
You're a light company, and that means you can go where other soldiers can't. It makes you an elite. You know what that means? It means you're the best men in the bloody army, and right now the army needs its best men. It needs you.
Sharpe's Fortress (1999)
There's a great bloody mine, sir! Just waiting to kill our lads! I ain't letting that happen. You can do what you bloody well like, but I'm going to kill some more of these bastards.
Sharpe's Tiger (1997)
If you capture a ship, Sharpe, you keep the old name unless it's really obnoxious. Nelson took the Franklin at the Nile, an eighty gun thing of great beauty, but the navy will be damned if it has a ship named after a traitorous bloody Yankee so we call her the Canopus now.
Sharpe's Trafalgar (2000)
They were the elite, the damned, the Rifles. They were Soldiers in green. They were Sharpe's Rifles.
The Forlorn Hope was for the brave. It may have been a courage born of desperation, or foolhardiness, but it was courage just the same.
(pg. 13)
Sharpe's Company (1982)
He asked three things of his men. That they fought, as he did, with a ruthless professionalism. That they stole only from the enemy and the dead unless they were starving. And that they never got drunk without his permission.