Wit & Attitude Quote by Bernard Cornwell

Self-pity is treated here as a kind of fraud: a complaint filed after you’ve already signed the contract. Cornwell’s line lands with the blunt authority of someone who writes about people trapped in consequences - soldiers, kings, strivers - and refuses to let them pretend surprise when the bill arrives. “Volunteered” does the heavy lifting. It casts life not as fate but as enlistment, a choice made with at least partial knowledge of risk. That single word also smuggles in a moral code: if you raised your hand, you owe the situation your spine.

The profanity isn’t just swagger; it’s a rhetorical discipline. “Bitch” snaps the sentence shut, policing a boundary between legitimate suffering and performative grievance. Cornwell isn’t denying hardship. He’s denying the luxury of narrating yourself as a victim of your own ambitions. The subtext is anti-romantic: wanting a life - fame, adventure, artistry, even family - includes wanting its costs, or at least accepting them without theatrical indignation.

Contextually, this reads like the writer’s version of a warrior ethos. Novelists, like the heroes Cornwell often depicts, choose a life that’s part obsession, part grind: long solitude, public judgment, the constant pressure to produce. The quote functions as self-management and as a quiet rebuke to a culture that prizes choosing your path while also rewarding complaint as a form of authenticity. Cornwell’s stance is harsher, cleaner: agency means accountability, even when the dream stops feeling like one.