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7248996
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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 that passes, the corners are knocked off the certainties of this world: and the next world too.
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Hilary Mantel |
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f465f80
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The authorities in Yorkshire have rounded up their rioters, and divided them into those to be charged with affray and manslaughter, and those to be indicted for murder and rape. Rape? Since when do food riots involve rape? But I forget, this is Yorkshire."530"
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Hilary Mantel |
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ba8afbe
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Another man would have trouble imagining it, but he has no trouble. The red of a carpet's ground, the flush of the robin's breast or the chaffinch, the red of a wax seal or the heart of the rose: implanted in his landscape, cered in his inner eye, and caught in the glint of a ruby, in the color of blood, the cardinal is alive and speaking. Look at my face: I am not afraid of any man alive.
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Hilary Mantel |
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6222e78
|
He makes a gesture, designed to impersonate frankness.
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Hilary Mantel |
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10f269a
|
Richard goes with a bob of the head but without another word. It seems he interprets 'don't tell anybody' as 'don't tell anybody but Rafe', because ten minutes later Rafe comes in, and stands looking at him, with his eyebrows raised. Red-headed people can look quite strained when they are raising eyebrows that aren't really there.
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Hilary Mantel |
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819735f
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He feared, in his secret heart, that one day in company the baby would sit up and speak; that it would engage his eyes, appraise him, and say, 'You prick.
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Hilary Mantel |
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05160ef
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He doesn't believe the dead need our prayers, nor can they use them. But anyone who knows the Bible as he does, knows that our God is a capricious God, and there's no harm in hedging your bets.
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Hilary Mantel |
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f9fc05f
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The world corrupts me, I think. Or perhaps it's just the weather. It pulls me down and makes me think like you, that one should shrink inside, down and down to a little point of light, preserving one's solitary soul like a flame under glass
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Hilary Mantel |
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83d4a35
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Not a word, not a word of love, Prehaps, she thought, he does not love in the ordinary way. God loves us, after all, He manifests it in cancer, cholera, Siamese twins. Not all forms of love are comprehensible, and some forms of love destroy what they touch.
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Hilary Mantel |
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471548b
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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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tudors
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Hilary Mantel |
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c3e3c7c
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I was bound to step out of line, if only because I did not know where the line was: if only because I did not know anything.
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Hilary Mantel |
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d048244
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The English will never be forgiven for the talent for destruction they have always displayed when they get off their own island.
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Hilary Mantel |
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1f05906
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The world moves on so fast, and we lose all chance of being the women our mothers were; we lose all understanding of what shaped them.
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Hilary Mantel |
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c852c79
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How many men can say, as I must, 'I am a man whose only friend is the King of England'? I have everything, you would think. And yet take Henry away, and I have nothing.
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Hilary Mantel |
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feba701
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Robespierre has never forgiven his friends the injuries he has done them, nor the kindnesses he has received from them, nor the talents some of them possess that he doesn't.
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truth
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Hilary Mantel |
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589bce6
|
So now get up.' Felled, dazed, silent, he has fallen; knocked full length on the cobbles of the yard. His head turns sideways; his eyes are turned toward the gate, as if someone might arrive to help him out. One blow, properly placed, could kill him now.
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henry-viii
thomas-cromwell
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Hilary Mantel |
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a12f831
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He saw that it was the gaps that were important, the spaces between the threads which made the pattern, and not the threads themselves.
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memory
threads
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Hilary Mantel |
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8e80e94
|
Full bellies breed gentle manners. The pinch of famine makes monsters.
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hunger
monsters
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Hilary Mantel |
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b448650
|
If you help load a cart you get a ride in it, as often as not. It gives him to think, how bad people are at loading carts. Men trying to walk straight ahead through a narrow gateway with a wide wooden chest. A simple rotation of the object solves a great many problems.
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history
practicality
tudors
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Hilary Mantel |
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7660d84
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Is a woman bound to wifely obedience, when the result will be to turn her out of the estate of wife?
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duty
wife
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Hilary Mantel |
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a042c8c
|
Innocence is a bleeding wound without a bandage, a wound that opens with every casual knock from casual passers-by. Experience is an armour.
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innocence
life-lessons
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Hilary Mantel |
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5aec27b
|
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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Hilary Mantel |
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b84d713
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It doesn't matter what the terms are, just that there are terms. It's the goodwill that matters. When that runs out, the treaty is broken, whatever the terms say.
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Hilary Mantel |
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b20b3a6
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The gift blesses the giver.
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an-occult-history-of-britain
gifts
thomas-cromwell
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Hilary Mantel |
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e21c262
|
He does not know what caused him to break off from Weston and walk out. Perhaps it was when the boy said 'forty-five or fifty'. As if, past mid-life, there is a second childhood, a new phase of innocence. It touched him, perhaps, the simplicity of it. Or perhaps he just needed air. Let us say you are in a chamber, the windows sealed, you are conscious of the proximity of other bodies, of the declining light. In the room you put cases, you p..
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Hilary Mantel |
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887c747
|
So this morning--waking early, brooding on what Liz said last night--he wonders, why should my wife worry about women who have no sons? Possibly it's something women do: spend time imagining what it's like to be each other.
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Hilary Mantel |
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92ecc72
|
Thomas More syas that the imperial troops, for their enjoyment, are roasting live babies on spits. Oh, he would! says Thomas Cromwell. Listen, soldiers don't do that. They're too busy carrying away everything they can turn into ready money.
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Hilary Mantel |
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3b585d0
|
Last night he kept the vigil alone. He lay awake, wishing Liz back; waiting for her to come and lie beside him. It's true he is at Esher with the cardinal, not at home at the Austin Friars. But, he thought, she'll know how to find me. She'll look for the cardinal, drawn through the space between worlds by incense and candlelight. Whereever the cardinal is, I will be.
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Hilary Mantel |
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e8108f8
|
But I want him north," Howard says. "Tell him to go. Tell him Norfolk says he must be on the road and out of here. Or--and tell him this--I will come where he is, and I will tear him with my teeth." "My lord." He bows. "May I substitute the word 'bite'?" Norfolk approaches him. He stands far too close. His eyes are bloodshot. Every sinew is jumping. He says, "Substitute nothing, you misbegotten--" the duke stabs a forefinger into his should..
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Hilary Mantel |
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fb20f97
|
The hunter is among the most innocent of men; living in the moment makes him feel pure. When he returns in the evening, his body aches, his mind is full of pictures of leaves and sky; he does not want to read documents. His miseries, his perplexities have receded, and they will tay away, provided--after food and wine, laughter and exchange of storeis--he gets up at dawn to do it all over again. But the winter king, less occupied, will begin..
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Hilary Mantel |
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83cc46a
|
Damn it all, Cromwell, why are you such a . . . person? It isn't as if you could afford to be.
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Hilary Mantel |
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c49ee04
|
The ladies of Italy, seemingly carefree, wore constructions of iron beneath their silks. It took infinite patience, not just in negotiation, to get them of of their clothes.
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Hilary Mantel |
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3eef1f4
|
There cannot be new things in England. There can be old things freshly presented or new things that pretend to be old.
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Hilary Mantel |
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edb0866
|
God knows what risks we take, God knows all that Danton has done. God and Camille. God will keep his mouth shut.
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Hilary Mantel |
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0c069e3
|
Wolsey always said that the making of a treaty is the treaty. It doesn't matter what the terms are, just that there are terms. It's the goodwill that matters. When that runs out, the treaty is broken, whatever the terms say. It is the processions that matter, the exchange of gifts, the royal games of bowls, the tilts, jousts and masques; these are not preliminaries to the process, they are the process itself.
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royalty
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Hilary Mantel |
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da5062a
|
You can strike, or you can not strike, and if you choose to hold back the blow, you can still feel inside you the resonance of the omitted thing.
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Hilary Mantel |
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ae7eb67
|
Some said the world would end in 1533. Last year had its adherents too. Why not this year? There is always somebody ready to claim that these are the end times, and nominate his neighbor as the Antichrist.
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Hilary Mantel |
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59b0c4d
|
No son wishes to see his son less powerful than himself.
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pg-257
the-dead-coplain-of-their-burial
thomas-cromwell
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Hilary Mantel |
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f12bf8c
|
This was the usual thing. What I asked for was facts: what I got was a sermon.
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Hilary Mantel |
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93d104b
|
You know young Francis Weston? He that waits on the king? His people are giving out that you're a Hebrew... Next time you're at court, take your cock out and put it on the table and see what he says to that. ~ I do that anyway, if the conversation flags.
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Hilary Mantel |
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efcffd6
|
You know what it's like when a cart overturns in the street? Everybody you meet has witnessed it. They saw a man's leg sliced clean off. They saw a woman gasp her last. They saw the goods looted, thieves stealing from the back-end while the carter was crushed at the front. They heard a man roar out his last confession, while another whispered his last will and testament. And if all the people who say they were there had really been there, t..
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Hilary Mantel |
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af922b8
|
When no one else could see, he could see: and that is what it means to be a king.
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Hilary Mantel |
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f349df7
|
The spectacles of pain and disgrace I see around me, the ignorance, the unthinking vice, the poverty and the lack of hope, and oh, the rain--the rain that falls on England and rots the grain, puts out the light in the man's eye and the light of learning too, for who can reason if Oxford is a giant puddle and Cambridge is washing away downstream, and who will enforce the laws if the judges are swimming for their lives?
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Hilary Mantel |
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3946026
|
Bargain all you like. Consign yourself to the hangman if you must. The people don't give a fourpenny fuck." 512"
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Hilary Mantel |