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c8384b7
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But the winter king, less occupied, will begin to think about his conscience. He will begin to think about his pride. He will begin to prepare the prizes for those who can deliver him results.
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Hilary Mantel |
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0fd81d9
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The page of an accounts book is there for your use, like a love poem. It's not there for you to nod and then dismiss it; it's there to open your heart to possibility. It's like the scriptures: it's there for you to think about, and initiate action. Love your neighbor. Study the market. Increase the spread of benevolence. Bring in better figures next year.
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Hilary Mantel |
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87b7028
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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 street and stamped on. Pg.406
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richard-cromwell
sales
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Hilary Mantel |
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87c208d
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He will remember his first sight of the open sea: a gray wrinkled vastness, like the residue of a dream.
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Hilary Mantel |
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02c96bc
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It is St. Catherine's Day: in honor of the saint who was threatened with martyrdom on a wheel, we all walk in circles to our destination. At least, that's the theory. He has never seen anyone over the age of twelve actually doing it.
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Hilary Mantel |
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43f8dfa
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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 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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bd2c232
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He cannot quite accept that real property cannot be changed into money with the same speed and ease with which he changes a wafer into the body of Christ.
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Hilary Mantel |
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0152652
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T]here comes a point where the fear is too great and the human spirit just gives up and a child wanders off numb and directionless and ends up following a crowd and watching a killing.
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Hilary Mantel |
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ccf0c61
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Gambling is not a vice, if you can afford to do it.
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Hilary Mantel |
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c675abd
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A printing press that can write its own books? A mind that thinks about itself? If I don't have it, at least the King of France doesn't either.
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Hilary Mantel |
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02bfbb4
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But what do they get by the change? One dog sated with meat is replaced by a hungrier dog who bites nearer the bone. Out goes the man grown fat with honor, and in comes a hungry and a lean man.
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ch-visitation
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Hilary Mantel |
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16e65a0
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All that evening he talked to the Candle of Arras, in a low confidential tone. When you get down to it, he thought, there's not much difference between politics and sex; it's all about power. He didn't suppose he was the first person in the world to make this observation. It's a question of seduction, and how fast and cheap you can effect it: if Camille, he thought, approximates to one of those little milliners who can't make ends meet - in..
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politics
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Hilary Mantel |
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0e07774
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In these matters, the cardinal says, there is no measure of time; these spirits slip from our hands and through the ages, serpentine, mutable, sly.
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Hilary Mantel |
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662569c
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When I was small I dreamed of demons. I thought they were under my bed, but you said, it can't be so, you don't get demons our side of the river, the guards won't let them over London Bridge.
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dreams
fear
funny
nightmares
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Hilary Mantel |
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c2af60a
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If you knew at twenty what you know at thirty-five, what a marvellous life you could have; on the other hand, you might find that you couldn't be bothered to have any life at all.
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Hilary Mantel |
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7f9eb16
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Sion calls Anne an eel, he calls her a slippery dipper from the slime, and he remembers what the cardinal had called her: my serpentine enemy. Sion says, she goes to it with her brother; he says, what, her brother George? 'Any brother she's got. Those kind keep it in the family. They do filthy French tricks, like -' 'Can you keep your voice down?' He looks around, as if spies might be swimming by the boat. '- and that's how she trusts herse..
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Hilary Mantel |
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26d47a6
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You should not desire, he knows, the death of any human creature. Death is your prince, you are not his patron; when you think he is engaged somewhere, he will batter down your door, walks in and wipes his boots on you.
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Hilary Mantel |
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797ad19
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he holds the boy, feeling the jump of his pulses, his stiff sinews, the ropes of his muscles, and makes sounds of comfort, as he did to his children when they were small, or as he does to a spaniel whose tail has been trodden on. Comfort is often, he finds, imparted at the cost of a flea or two." 523"
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Hilary Mantel |
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665b54b
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No man as godly as George, the only fault he finds with God is that he made folk with too few orifices. If George could meet a woman with a quinny under her armpit, he would call out 'Glory be' and set her up in a house and visit her every day, until the novelty wore off. Nothing is forbidden to George, you see. He'd go to it with a terrier bitch if she wagged her tail at him and said bow-wow.' For once he is struck silent. He knows he will..
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Hilary Mantel |
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e8616b5
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I you ask me about the monks, I speak from experience, not prejudice, and though I have no doubt that some foundations are well governed, my experience has been of waste and corruption. May I suggest to Your Majesty that, if you wish to see a parade of the seven deadly sins, you do not organise a masque at court but call without notice at a monastery?
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Hilary Mantel |
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8ade0f8
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The old marchioness had him tracing down bed hangings and carpets for her. Send that. Be here. To her, all the world was a menial. If she wanted a lobster or a sturgeon, she ordered it up, and if she wanted good taste she ordered it in the same way. The marchioness would run her hand over Florentine silks, making little squeaks of pleasure. "You bought it, Master Cromwell," she would say. "And very beautiful it is. Your next task is to work..
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Hilary Mantel |
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e0e1001
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Concentrate on sharpening your memory and peeling your sensibility. Cut every page you write by at least one third. Stop constructing those piffling little similes of yours. Work out what it is you want to say. Then say it in the most direct and vigorous way you can. Eat meat. Drink blook. Give up your social life and don't think you can have friends. Rise in the quiet hours of the night and prick your fingertips and use the blood for ink; ..
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writing-craft
writing-life
writing-process
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Hilary Mantel |
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88149e8
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Suppose she denied him then but favored him some other time? Women are weak and easily conquered by flattery. Especially when men write verses to them, and there are some who sat that Wyatt writes better verses than me, though I am the King.
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Hilary Mantel |
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03ddfd9
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Come to that, don't pay out good money for horoscopes. If things are going to go badly for you, is that what you need to know as you saddle up?
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Hilary Mantel |
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1d276d2
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I felt," he said, "irritated. It seemed a waste, I suppose. To come so far. To cross the sea. To die for . . ." He shrugs. "God knows why."
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Hilary Mantel |
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2a55660
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CAMILLE DESMOULINS: For the establishment of liberty and the safety of the nation, one day of anarchy will do more than ten years of National Assemblies.
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Hilary Mantel |
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067fdb0
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A pottery outside Paris was turning out his picture on thick glazed crockery in a strident yellow and blue. This is what happens when you become a public figure; people eat their dinners off you.
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humour
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Hilary Mantel |
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932c62c
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Do you know Camille Desmoulins?" he asked. "Have you seen him? He's one of these law-school boys. Never used anything more dangerous than a paper knife." He shook his head wonderingly. "Where do they come from, these people? They're virgins. They've never been to war. They've never been on the hunting field. They've never killed an animal, let alone a man. But they're such enthusiasts for murder."
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Hilary Mantel |
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4192365
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Your fear is, that if you marry Adele, you will love her. If you have children, you will love them more than anything else in the world, more than patriotism, more than democracy. If your children grow up, and prove traitors to the people, will you be able to demand their deaths, as the Romans did? Perhaps you will, but perhaps you will not be able to do it. You're afraid that if you love people you may be deflected from your duty, but it's..
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patria
revolution
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Hilary Mantel |
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7a98510
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Gradually, you see, our people are coming into the power they have always thought is their due.
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Hilary Mantel |
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c661575
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He looks at Norris, exasperated. He seems to think that with eloquence, with sincerity, with frankness, he can change what is happening. The whole court has seen him slobbering over the queen. How could he expect to go shopping with his eyes, and finger the goods no doubt, and not have an account to settle at the end of it?
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humour
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Hilary Mantel |
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2eb7e9f
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But remember this above all: defeat your instinct. Your love of glory must conquer your will to survive; or why fight at all? Why not be a smith, a brewer, a wool merchant? Why are you in the contest, if not to win, and if not to win, then to die?
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Hilary Mantel |
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24fe7d3
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Talking to Robespierre, one tried to make the right noises; but what is right, these days? Address yourself to the militant, and you find a pacifist giving you a reproachful look. Address yourself to the idealist, and you'll find that you've fallen into the company of a cheerful, breezy professional politician. Address yourself to means, and you'll be told to think of ends: to ends, and you'll be told to think of means. Make an assumption, ..
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french-revolution
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Hilary Mantel |
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a28ba37
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At first they'd thought the guillotine would be a sweet, clean business, but when you have twenty, perhaps thirty heads to take off in a day, there are problems of scale.
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french-revolution
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Hilary Mantel |
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f717648
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Life's going to change. You thought it already had? Not nearly as much as it's going to change now. Everything you disapprove of you'll call "aristocratic." This term can be applied to food, to books and plays, to modes of speech, to hairstyles and to such venerable institutions as prostitution and the Roman Catholic Church. If "Liberty" was the watchword of the first Revolution, "Equality" is that of the second. "Fraternity" is a less asse..
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Hilary Mantel |
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cb58282
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Provence and Artois will be back. Antoinette. She will resume her state. The priests will be back. Children now in their cradles will suffer for what their fathers and mothers did.' Marat leaned forward, his body hunched, his eyes intent, as he did when he spoke from the tribune at the Jacobins. 'It will be an abattoir, an abattoir of a nation.
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politics
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Hilary Mantel |
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e14173f
|
Some people know they are condemned; some have time to pray, and others die struggling and screaming, fighting to their last breath. An irate killer stamps in to the tribunal--"Use your heads, give us a bloody chance, can't you? We can't keep up." So the prisoners are waved away airily by their judges--"Go, you're free." Outside the door a steady man waits to fell them. Freedom is the last thing they know."
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Hilary Mantel |
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52c1b05
|
and I sometimes think that the fading out of the individual personality is what one should desire, not the status of a hero--a sort of effacement of oneself from history. The entire record of the human race has been falsified, it has been made up by bad governments to suit themselves, by kings and tyrants to make them look good. This idea of history as made by great men is quite nonsensical, when you look at it from the point of view of the..
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history
robespierre
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Hilary Mantel |
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21f46a2
|
I felt a wish to be fictionalized.
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Hilary Mantel |
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4c9ec63
|
Beneath every history, another history.
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Hilary Mantel |
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c582636
|
Of course I have had to rearrange the text a bit-- bugger about with it, as Hebert would say.
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humour
jurnalism
|
Hilary Mantel |
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4cb5b2f
|
Would they quarrel so much, if they were indifferent?
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Hilary Mantel |
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ea92562
|
The princess] looks out and sees the humble musician with his lute. But unless the musician turns out to be a prince in disguise, this story cannot end well.
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Hilary Mantel |
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cc5b992
|
Give me a book," she said. "A book of sermons, anything." "What do you want a book for?" "I want words. I've got to have more words. I was kept stupid on purpose."
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Hilary Mantel |