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bd857d0
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Wolsey sits with his elbows on his desk, his fingers dabbing his closed lids. He takes a great breath, and begins to talk: he begins to talk about England. You can't know Albion, he says, unless you can go back before Albion was thought of. You must go back before Caesar's legions, to the days when the bones of giant animals and men lay on the ground where one day London would be built. You must go back to the New Troy, the New Jerusalem, a..
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Hilary Mantel |
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b88f213
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Edward Seymour says, 'You should have been a bishop, Cromwell.' 'Edward,' he says, 'I should have been Pope.
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Hilary Mantel |
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56bf54b
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She turns her head away, but through the thin film of her veil he can see her skin glow. Because women will coax: tell me, just tell me something, tell me your thoughts; and this he has done.
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Hilary Mantel |
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da7662f
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This visit has compacted the court's quarrels and intrigues, trapped them in the small space within the town's walls. The travelers have become as intimate with each other as cards in a pack: contiguous, but their paper eyes blind.
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Hilary Mantel |
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4cf78a4
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I know she's rather plain, but every girl has a right to conceal that fact from people who haven't seen her.
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Hilary Mantel |
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e1ba4b8
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He feels as if he is floating, and she is weighting him to earth; he would like to put his arms around her and his face in her apron, and rest there listening to her heartbeat. But he doesn't want to mess her up, get blood all down the front of her.
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Hilary Mantel |
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747304c
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They claim they're living the vita apostolica; but you didn't find the apostles feeling each other's bollocks.
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Hilary Mantel |
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c15dc2a
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Cranmer says, 'We will try again with More. At least, if he refuses, he should give his reasons.' He swears under his breath, turns from the window. 'We know his reasons. All Europe knows them. He is against the divorce. He does not believe the king can be head of the church. But will he say that? Not he. I know him. Do you know what I hate? I hate to be part of this play, which is entirely devised by him. I hate the time it will take that ..
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Hilary Mantel |
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4b34086
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In order not to make a liar out of Henry or Katherine, one or the other, the committee men think up circumstances in which the match may have been partly consummated, or somewhat consummated, and to do this they have to imagine every disaster and shame that can occur between a man and a woman alone in a room in the dark.
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henry-viii
humor
sex
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Hilary Mantel |
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d328d39
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A lie is no less a lie because it is a thousand years old. Your undivided church has liked nothing better than persecuting its own members, burning them and hacking them apart when they stood by their own conscience, slashing their bellies open and feeding their guts to dogs.
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lies
revisionist-history
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Hilary Mantel |
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a4c6db5
|
He had only thought, and Wolsey had only thought, that the Emperor and Spain would be against it. Only the Emperor. He smiles in the dark, hands behind his head. He doesn't say which people, but waits for Liz to tell him. 'All women,' she says. 'All women everywhere in England. All women who have a daughter but not a son. All women who have lost a child. All women who have lost any hope of having a child. All women who are forty.
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Hilary Mantel |
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4d80b59
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Writing's like running downhill; can't stop if you want to.
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Hilary Mantel |
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79b573d
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Our schools kept from us, for as long as they could, the dangerous, disruptive, upsetting knowledge of our own female nature.
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Hilary Mantel |
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ef3bde8
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I look like a watermelon with a great slice hacked out. I say to myself, it's just another border post on the frontier between medicine and greengrocery; growths and tumour seem always to be described as "the size of a plum" or "the size of a grapefruit"."
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Hilary Mantel |
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740f944
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The world beyond the glass is the world of masculine action. Everything she sees is what a man has built. But at each turn-off, each junction, women are waiting to know their fate.
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Hilary Mantel |
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5afb80f
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He says, this silence of More's, it was never really silence, was it? It was loud with his treason; it was quibbling as far as quibbles would serve him, it was demurs and cavils, suave ambiguities. It was fear of plain words, or the assertion that plain words pervert themselves; More's dictionary, against our dictionary. You can have a silence full of words. A lute retains, in its bowl, the notes it has played. The viol, in its strings, hol..
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Hilary Mantel |
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8e3e136
|
They hurry in; the wind bangs a door behind them. Rafe takes his arm. He says, this silence of More's, it was never really silence, was it? It was loud with his treason; it was quibbling as far as quibbles would serve him, it was demurs and cavils, suave ambiguities. It was fear of plain words, or the assertion that plain words pervert themselves; More's dictionary, against our dictionary. You can have a silence full of words. A lute retain..
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Hilary Mantel |
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0ff2c1f
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He reaches for his pen. He yawns and puts it down and picks it up again. I shall be found dead at my desk, he thinks, like the poet Petrarch. The poet wrote many unsent letters: he wrote to Cicero, who died twelve hundred years before he was born. He wrote to Homer, who possibly never even existed; but I, I have enough to do with Lord Lisle, and the fish traps, and the Emperor's galleons tossing on the Middle Sea. Between one dip of the pen..
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Hilary Mantel |
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6abb7fa
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It's not easy to speak of nonexistence, even if you've already commissioned your tomb.
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Hilary Mantel |
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8017b5a
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I said to my mother, Henry VII is interesting. No he's not, my mother said.
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historical-fiction
history
mother-and-daughter
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Hilary Mantel |
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c7418ba
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His suppressed grief becomes anger. But what can he do with anger? It must also be suppressed.
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an-occult-history-of-britain
anger
grief
suppressed-anger
suppression
thomas-cromwell
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Hilary Mantel |
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e0b7275
|
Saint-Just read for the next two hours his report on the plots of the Dantonist faction. He had imagined, when he wrote it, that he had the accused man before him; he had not amended it. If Danton were really before him, this reading would be punctuated by the roars of his supporters from the galleries, by his own self-justificatory roaring; but Saint-Just addressed the air, and there was a silence, which deepened and fed on itself. He read..
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Hilary Mantel |
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e611e1a
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The main thing is, the constraints have come off style. What we are saying now is that the Revolution does not proceed in a pitiless, forward direction, its politics and its language becoming ever more gross and simplistic: the Revolution is always flexible, subtle, elegant.
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politics
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Hilary Mantel |
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c5fcfd7
|
Where is Richard, do you know?" "Chopping onions on the back step. Oh, you mean Master Richard? Upstairs. Eating. Where's anybody?"
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Hilary Mantel |
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bbeca1c
|
Oh, you are not disappointing," Henry says. "But the moment you are, I will let you know."
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Hilary Mantel |
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691a933
|
What is the nature of the border between truth and lies? It is permeable and blurred because it is planted thick with rumour, confabulation, misunderstandings and twisted tales. Truth can break the gates down, truth can howl in the street; unless truth is pleasing, personable and easy to like, she is condemned to stay whimpering at the back door.
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hilary-mantel
lies
truth
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Hilary Mantel |
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25ad613
|
Leases, writes, statutes, all are written to be read and each person reads them by the light of self-interest.
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Hilary Mantel |
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d094ef9
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If life is a chain of gold, sometimes God hangs a charm on it.
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Hilary Mantel |
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351668f
|
There are some strange cold people in this world. It is priests, I think...Training themselves out of natural feeling. They mean it for the best, of course.
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Hilary Mantel |
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9207565
|
He is not a man wedded to action, Boleyn, but rather a man who stands by, smirking and stroking his beard; he thinks he looks enigmatic, but instead he looks as if he's pleasuring himself.
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humor
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Hilary Mantel |
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6a5febb
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Henry stirs into life. 'Do I retain you for what is easy? Do you think it is for your personal beauty? The charm of your presence? I keep you, Master Cromwell, because you are as cunning as a bag of serpents. But do not be a viper in my bosom. You know my decision. Execute it.' pg. 585
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henry-viii
thomas-cromwell
wolf-hall
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Hilary Mantel |
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04a7367
|
Already d'Anton did not believe this. He recognized it as a disclaimer that Camille would issue from time to time in the hope of disguising the fact that he was an inveterate hell-raiser.
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Hilary Mantel |
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fe61657
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Sometimes I'm at stool all night." 507"
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Hilary Mantel |
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a6155bd
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He, Cromwell, watches. They are not the same couple from day to day: sometimes doting, sometimes chilly and distanced. The billing and cooing, on the whole, is the more painful to watch." 516"
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Hilary Mantel |
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d517dae
|
His sister Kat, her husband, Morgan Williams, have been plucked from this life as fast as his daughters were taken, one day walking and talking and next day cold as stones, tumbled into their Thames-side graves and dug in beyond reach of the tide, beyond sight and smell of the river; deaf now to the sound of Putney's cracked church bell, to the smell of wet ink, of hops, of malted barley, and the scent, still animal, of woolen bales; dead t..
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Hilary Mantel |
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ec57513
|
Why did you let her take the head off London Bridge?" Cromwell:"You know me, Stephen. The fluid of benevolence flows through my veins and sometimes overspills."
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Hilary Mantel |
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8fa652d
|
In Paris the swaying lanterns are lit in the streets; lights shine through water, fuzzy, diffuse. Saint-Just sits by an insufficient fire, in a poor light. He is a Spartan after all, and Spartans don't need home comforts. He has begun his report, his list of accusations; if Robespierre saw it now, he would tear it up, but in a few days' time it will be the very thing he needs. Sometimes he stops, half-glances over his shoulder. He feels som..
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Hilary Mantel |
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4a960c0
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For hundreds of years the monks have held the pen, and what they have written is what we take to be our history, but I do not believe it really is. I believe they have suppressed the history they don't like, and written one that is favourable to Rome.' Henry
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Hilary Mantel |
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9d66033
|
Cardinal Campeggio has implored Katherine to bow to the king's will, accept that her marriage is invalid and retire to a convent. Certainly, she says sweetly, she will become a nun: if the king will become a monk.
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wit
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Hilary Mantel |
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935b28e
|
When the cardinal came to a closed door he would flatter it--oh beautiful yielding door! Then he would try tricking it open. And you are just the same, just the same." He pours himself some of the duke's present. "But in the last resort, you just kick it in."
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thomas-cromwell
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Hilary Mantel |
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0b30057
|
He looked the Prince up and down, like a hangman taking his measurements. 'Of course there will be a revolution,' he said. 'You are making a nation of Cromwells. But we can go beyond Cromwell, I hope. In fifteen years you tyrants and parasites will be gone. We shall have set up a republic, on the purest Roman model.
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revolution
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Hilary Mantel |
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6c6830f
|
Just think, she said to herself. I could be living on the Right Bank. I could be married to a senior clerk at the Treasury. I could be sitting with my feet up, embroidering a linen handkerchief with a rambling-rose design. Instead I'm on the rue des Cordeliers in pursuit of a baguette, with a three-inch blade for comfort.
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humour
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Hilary Mantel |
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85b1ec5
|
Tell me, why do you think I do this?" The king sounds curious. "Out of lust? Is that what you think?" Kill a cardinal? Divide your country? Split the church? 'Seems extravagant,' Chapuys murmurs."
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Hilary Mantel |
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1a7e1a1
|
Men, it is supposed want to pass their wisdom to their sons; he would give a great deal to protect his own son from a quartr of what he knows.
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Hilary Mantel |