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25cc9e2
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It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.
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knowledge
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Hilary Mantel |
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982b4df
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Some of these things are true and some of them lies. But they are all good stories.
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story
reading
fiction
books
read
stories
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Hilary Mantel |
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6bd856b
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It is all very well planning what you will do in six months, what you will do in a year, but it's no good at all if you don't have a plan for tomorrow.
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Hilary Mantel |
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1ac49b2
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You learn nothing about men by snubbing them and crushing their pride. You must ask them what it is they can do in this world, that they alone can do.
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men
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Hilary Mantel |
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7f32c90
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When you are writing laws you are testing words to find their utmost power. Like spells, they have to make things happen in the real world, and like spells, they only work if people believe in them.
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words
magic
spells
laws
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Hilary Mantel |
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2a64b7d
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The trouble with England, he thinks, is that it's so poor in gesture. We shall have to develop a hand signal for 'Back off, our prince is fucking this man's daughter.' He is surprised that the Italians have not done it. Though perhaps they have, and he just never caught on.
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Hilary Mantel |
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281fe3c
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Why are we so attached to the severities of the past? Why are we so proud of having endured our fathers and our mothers, the fireless days and the meatless days, the cold winters and the sharp tongues? It's not as if we had a choice.
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Hilary Mantel |
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17ee422
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He thinks, I remembered you, Thomas More, but you didn't remember me. You never even saw me coming.
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Hilary Mantel |
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87c2b99
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But it is no use to justify yourself. It is no good to explain. It is weak to be anecdotal. It is wise to conceal the past even if there is nothing to conceal. A man's power is in the half-light, in the half-seen movements of his hand and the unguessed-at expression of his face. It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.
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secret
power
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Hilary Mantel |
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bf187d5
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Some say the Tudors transcend this history, bloody and demonic as it is: that they descend from Brutus through the line of Constantine, son of St Helena, who was a Briton. Arthur, High King of Britain, was Constantine's grandson. He married up to three women, all called Guinevere, and his tomb is at Glastonbury, but you must understand that he is not really dead, only waiting his time to come again. His blessed descendant, Prince Arthur of ..
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Hilary Mantel |
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4ec0cfc
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At New Year's he had given Anne a present of silver forks with handles of rock crystal. He hopes she will use them to eat with, not to stick in people.
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Hilary Mantel |
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de7b261
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Suppose within each book there is another book, and within every letter on every page another volume constantly unfolding; but these volumes take no space on the desk. Suppose knowledge could be reduced to a quintessence, held within a picture, a sign, held within a place which is no place. Suppose the human skull were to become capacious, spaces opening inside it, humming chambers like beehives.
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Hilary Mantel |
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c7aad09
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You can be merry with the king, you can share a joke with him. But as Thomas More used to say, it's like sporting with a tamed lion. You tousle its mane and pull its ears, but all the time you're thinking, those claws, those claws, those claws.
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Hilary Mantel |
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d1042f7
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Arrange your face
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Hilary Mantel |
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b16ab59
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Over the city lies the sweet, rotting odor of yesterday's unrecollected sins.
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Hilary Mantel |
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7f946e9
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You can have a silence full of words. A lute retains, in its bowl, the notes it has played. The viol, in its strings, holds a concord. A shriveled petal can hold its scent, a prayer can rattle with curses; an empty house, when the owners have gone out, can still be loud with ghosts.
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Hilary Mantel |
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4cff7df
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He needs guilty men. So he has found men who are guilty. Though perhaps not guilty as charged.
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Hilary Mantel |
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d118bde
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A man's power is in the half-light, in the half-seen movements of his hand and the unguessed-at expression of his face. It is the absence of facts tat frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.
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Hilary Mantel |
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92aeae9
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He never sees More - a star in another firmament, who acknowledges him with a grim nod - without wanting to ask him, what's wrong with you? Or what's wrong with me? Why does everything you know, and everything you've learned, confirm you in what you believed before? Whereas in my case, what I grew up with, and what I thought I believed, is chipped away a little and a little, a fragment then a piece and then a piece more. With every month th..
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Hilary Mantel |
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0f32822
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I have written books and I cannot unwrite them. I cannot unbelieve what i believe. I cannot unlive my life
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Hilary Mantel |
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a01a792
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He turns to the painting. "I fear Mark was right." "Who is Mark?" "A silly little boy who runs after George Boleyn. I once heard him say I looked like a murderer." Gregory says, "Did you not know?"
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fathers-and-sons
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Hilary Mantel |
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196c982
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If you are without impulses, you are, to a degree, without joy..." 469"
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Hilary Mantel |
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7e6729e
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H]ope takes you by the throat like a stranger, it makes your heart leap...
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Hilary Mantel |
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4988d91
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There is a pause, while she turns the great pages of her volume of rage, and puts her finger on just the right word.
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Hilary Mantel |
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c303d5d
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At some point on your road you have to turn and start walking back towards yourself. Or the past will pursue you, and bite the nape of your neck, leave you bleeding in the ditch. Better to turn and face it with such weapons as you possess.
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Hilary Mantel |
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524e165
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But my sins are my strength, he thinks; the sins I have done, that others have not even found the opportunity of committing. I hug them close; they're mine.
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Hilary Mantel |
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d573bb4
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When have I, when have I ever forced anyone to do anything, he starts to say: but Richard cuts in, "No, you don't, I agree, it's just that you are practiced at persuading, and sometimes it's quite difficult, sir, to distinguish being persuaded by you from being knocked down in the street and stamped on." -Richard (?) nee Cromwell to Thomas Cromwell,358"
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Hilary Mantel |
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39c49d5
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For one never thinks of you alone, Cremuel, but in company, studying the faces of other people, as if you yourself mean to paint them. You make other men think, not "what does he look like?" but "what do I look like?"
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Hilary Mantel |
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cedf338
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The reader may ask how to tell fact from fiction. A rough guide: anything that seems particularly unlikely is probably true.
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Hilary Mantel |
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d2dc750
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Once he had watched Liz making a silk braid. One end was pinned to the wall and on each finger of her raised hands she was spinning loops of thread, her fingers flying so fast he couldn't see how it worked. 'Slow down,' he said, 'so I can see how you do it,' but she'd laughed and said, 'I can't slow down, if I stopped to think how I was doing it I couldn't do it at all.
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inspirational
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Hilary Mantel |
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3a2e9b6
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The weight of the old world is stifling, and trying to shovel its weight off your life is tiring just to think about. The constant shuttling of opinions is tiring, and the shuffling of papers across desks, the chopping of logic and the trimming of attitudes. There must, somewhere, be a simpler, more violent world.
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Hilary Mantel |
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aa9dc6c
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I think now that this is the great division between people. There are people who find life hard and those who find it easy. There are those who have a natural, in-built, expectation of happiness, and there are those who feel that happiness is not to be expected: that it is not, in fact, one of the rights of man. Nor, God knows, one of the rights of women.
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happiness
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Hilary Mantel |
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b2396b8
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In the forest you may find yourself lost, without companions. You may come to a river which is not on a map. You may lose sight of your quarry, and forget why you are there. You may meet a dwarf, or the living Christ, or an old enemy of yours; or a new enemy, one you do not know until you see his face appear between the rustling leaves, and see the glint of his dagger. You may find a woman asleep in a bower of leaves. For a moment, before y..
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fiction
the-tudors
wolf-hall
thomas-cromwell
historical-fiction
england
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Hilary Mantel |
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f87fbce
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In England there is no mercy for the poor. You pay for everything, even a broken neck." 472"
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Hilary Mantel |
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765476b
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The story of my own childhood is a complicated sentence that I am always trying to finish, to finish and put behind me. It resists finishing, and partly this is because words are not enough; my early world was synaesthesic, and I am haunted by the ghosts of my own sense impressions, which re-emerge when I try to write, and shiver between the lines.
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past
life
consciousness
ghosts
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Hilary Mantel |
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d278d0f
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It is not the stars that make us, Dr. Butts, it is circumstance and , the choices we make under pressure; our virtues make us, but virtues are not enough, we must deploy our vices at times. Or don't you agree?
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Hilary Mantel |
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2113ada
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Once, in Thessaly, there was a poet called Simonides. He was commissioned to appear at a banquet, given by a man called Scopas, and recite a lyric in praise of his host. Poets have strange vagaries, and in his lyric Simonides incorporated verses in praise of Castor and Pollux, the Heavenly Twins. Scopas was sulky, and said he would pay only half the fee: 'As for the rest, get it from the Twins.' A little later, a servant came into the hall...
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Hilary Mantel |
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74fe145
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Sometimes peace looks like war, you cannot tell them apart.
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Hilary Mantel |
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c042a90
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Rafe asks him, could the king's freedom be obtained, sir, with more economy of means? Less bloodshed? Look, he says: once you have exhausted the process of negotiation and compromise, one you have fixed on the destruction of an enemy, that destruction must be swift and it must be perfect. Before you even glance in his direction, you should have his name on a warrant, the ports blocked, his wife and friends bought, his heir under your protec..
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Hilary Mantel |
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5acfe09
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Our virtues make us; but virtues are not enough, we must deploy our vices at times.
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Hilary Mantel |
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8ca2e24
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His speech is low and rapid, his manner assured; he is at home in courtroom or waterfront, bishop's palace or inn yard. He can draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house and fix a jury. He will quote you a nice point in the old authors, from Plato to Plautus and back again. He knows new poetry, and can say it in Italian. He works all hours, first up and last to bed. He makes money and he spends it. He..
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Hilary Mantel |
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3c1a06d
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She lives on the fumes of whiskey and the iron in the blood of her prey.
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Hilary Mantel |
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af5020a
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Christ, he thinks, by my age I ought to know. You don't get on by being original. You don't get on by being bright. You don't get on by being strong. You get on by being a subtle crook; somehow he thinks that's what Norris is, and he feels an irrational dislike taking root, and he tries to dismiss it, because he prefers his dislikes rational, but after all, these circumstances are extreme, the cardinal in the mud, the humiliating tussle to ..
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Hilary Mantel |
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2facca6
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an elegant woman, with a refinement that makes mere prettiness seem redundant.
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Hilary Mantel |