Turncoat Quotes

Sooner or later, if there isn't a turncoat, the people make one. ~ Stephen King

What's the deal with this Malachai?" Xevikan
"I don't know. I just joined him myself. But he seems level. Decent even." Zavid
"He's with a half-daeve turncoat, a Charonte, and an Aamon, and you don't find that off?" Xevikan
"Wait until you meet his Arel girlfriend, lunatic mother, and the two human homicidal maniac he calls family. Buddy, everything about the Malachai ain't right." Zavid ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

You're so loyal to him. Why is that?"
"I'm not a turncoat Akielon dog," said
Aimeric. ~ C.S. Pacat

Wine is a turne-coate (first a friend, then an enemy).
[Wine is a turncoat, first a friend, then an enemy.] ~ George Herbert

For the first time it strikes me that it must be hard to spend your life in exile and finally win your kingdom by a thread, by the action of a turncoat in battle, and to know that most of the country does not celebrate your luck, and the woman that you have to marry is in love with someone else: your dead enemy and the rightful king. I have been thinking of him as triumphant; but here I see a man burdened by an odd twist of fate, coming to victory by a sneaking disloyalty, on a hot day in August, uncertain even now, if God is with him. I ~ Philippa Gregory

What good is all this free-thinking, modernity, and turncoat flexibility if at some gut level you are still a Christian, a Catholic, and even a priest! ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Tate was sprawled across the bed in his robe early the next morning when the sound of the front door opening penetrated his mind. There was an unholy commotion out there and his head was still throbbing, despite a bath, several cups of coffee and a handful of aspirin that had been forced on him the day before by two men he'd thought were his friends. He didn't want to sober up. He only wanted to forget that Cecily didn't want him anymore.
He dragged himself off the bed and went into the living room, just in time to hear the door close.
Cecily and her suitcase were standing with mutual rigidity just inside the front door. She was wearing a dress and boots and a coat and hat, red-faced and muttering words Tate had never heard her use before.
He scowled. "How did you get here?" he asked.
"Your boss brought me!" she raged. "He and that turncoat Colby Lane and two bodyguards, one of whom was the female counterpart of Ivan the Terrible! They forcibly dressed me and packed me and flew me up here on Mr. Hutton's Learjet! When I refused to get out of the car, the male bodyguard swept me up and carried me here! I am going to kill people as soon as I get my breath and my wits back, and I am starting with you!"
He leaned against the wall, still bleary-eyed and only half awake. She was beautiful with her body gently swollen and her lips pouting and her green eye sin their big-lensed frames glittering at him.
She registered after a minute that he wasn't himsel ~ Diana Palmer

Offered a job as book critic for Time magazine as a young man, Bellow had been interviewed by Chambers and asked to give his opinion about William Wordsworth. Replying perhaps too quickly that Wordsworth had been a Romantic poet, he had been brusquely informed by Chambers that there was no place for him at the magazine. Bellow had often wondered, he told us, what he ought to have said. I suggested that he might have got the job if he'd replied that Wordsworth was a once-revolutionary poet who later became a conservative and was denounced by Browning and others as a turncoat. This seemed to Bellow to be probably right. More interesting was the related question: What if he'd kept that job? ~ Christopher Hitchens

Wine is a turncoat; first a friend and then an enemy. ~ Henry Fielding

Would it be such a terrible thing for us to fall in love?" he asked.
...
"Ask me again in the morning. ~ Donna Thurland

Time and again, my sociobiological colleagues have upbraided me as a turncoat, because I will not agree with them that the ultimate criterion for the success of a meme must be its contribution to Darwinian "fitness". At bottom, they insist, a "good meme" spreads because brains are receptive to it, and the receptiveness of brains is ultimately shaped by (genetic) natural selection. ~ Richard Dawkins