|
1f453c3
|
Were you ever at the cathedral in Chartres? You walk the labyrinth," he says, "set into the pavement, and it seems there is no sense in it. But if you follow it faithfully it leads you straight to the center. Straight to where you should be."
|
|
|
Hilary Mantel |
|
66e980a
|
he is sui generis, a scholar and a wit.
|
|
|
Hilary Mantel |
|
412008d
|
I wonder," he says, "how it can be that, though all these people think they know the king's pleasure, the king finds himself at every turn impeded." At every turn, thwarted: maddened and baffled."
|
|
|
Hilary Mantel |
|
c6dcb1a
|
Exactly," he says. "And look, Gregory, it's 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."
|
|
|
Hilary Mantel |
|
f09abbd
|
If your chance comes to serve, you will have to take him as he is, a pleasure-loving prince. And he will have to take you as you are, which is rather like one of those square-shaped fighting dogs that low men tow about on ropes. Not that you are without a fitful charm, Tom.
|
|
|
Hilary Mantel |
|
9e7ab0a
|
You must, of course. Robespierre doesn't lie or cheat or steal, doesn't get drunk, doesn't fornicate--overmuch. He's not a hedonist or a mainchancer or a breaker of promises." Danton grinned. "But what's the use of all this goodness? People don't try to emulate you. Instead they just pull the wool over your eyes."
|
|
|
Hilary Mantel |
|
f493aa1
|
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 that passes, the corners are knocked off the certainties of this world: and the next world too.
|
|
|
Hilary Mantel |
|
60659cf
|
Brother Luca Pacioli. It took him thirty years to write." The book is bound in deepest green with a tooled border of gold, and its pages are edged in gilt, so that it blazes in the light. Its clasps are studded with blackish garnets, smooth, translucent. "I hardly dare open it," the boy says. "Please. You will like it." It is Summa de Arithmetica. He unclasps it to find a woodcut of the author with a book before him, and a pair of compasses..
|
|
|
Hilary Mantel |
|
b950679
|
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.
|
|
|
Hilary Mantel |
|
d180de3
|
You know he will take the credit for your good ideas, and you the blame for his bad ones? When fortune turns against you, you will feel her lash: you always, he never. One day, when you are still adjusting your harness, you will look up and see him thundering downhill. pg. 495
|
|
thomas-cromwell
wolf-hall
|
Hilary Mantel |
|
8c63bef
|
So much has been said between them that it is needless to add a marginal note. It is not for him now to gloss the text of their dealings, nor append a moral.
|
|
|
Hilary Mantel |
|
a221039
|
These are days of brutal truth from Tyndale. Saints are not your friends and they will not protect you. They cannot help you to salvation. You cannot engage them to your service with prayers and candles, as you might hire a man for the harvest. Christ's sacrifice was done on Calvary; it is not done in the Mass. Priests cannot help you to Heaven; you need no priest to stand between you and your God. No merits of yours can save you: only the ..
|
|
|
Hilary Mantel |
|
bfbead3
|
Florence and Milan had given him ideas more flexible than those of people who'd stayed at home.
|
|
|
Hilary Mantel |
|
c2a35ae
|
If he's not watering his ale, he's running illegal beasts on the common, if he's not despoiling the common he's assaulting an officer of the peace, if he's not drunk he's dead drunk, and if he's not dead before his time there's no justice in this world.
|
|
|
Hilary Mantel |
|
79bba93
|
you cannot tell people just part of the tale and then stop, or just tell them the parts you choose.
|
|
|
Hilary Mantel |
|
51287ce
|
Right, Thomas Cromwell," she said. "Make a note of this. No strange Dutch drinks. No women. No banned preachers in cellars. I know what you do." "I don't know if I can stay out of cellars." "Here's a bargain. You can take him to a sermon if you don't take him to a brothel."
|
|
|
Hilary Mantel |
|
4311931
|
Collot is back from Lyon, did you know? He had finished his work, as he describes it. His path of righteousness is very clear and straight and broad. It's so easy to be a good Jacobin. Collot hasn't a doubt or scruple in his head-- indeed, I doubt if he has much in it at all. Stop the Terror? He thinks we haven't even begun.
|
|
|
Hilary Mantel |
|
cd1caf8
|
He tries not to give offense. He likes to think of himself by nature as reasonable and conciliatory. He can duck out, prevaricate, evade the issue. He can smile enigmatically and refuse to come down on either side. He can quibble, and stand on semantics. It's a living, he thinks; but it isn't. For there comes the bald question, the one choice out of two: do you want a revolution, M. de Robespierre? Yes, damn you, damn all of you, I want it,..
|
|
|
Hilary Mantel |
|
89a161c
|
Has it ever occurred to you that Max feels the same basic contempt for you as you do for him?" "He feels contempt for me?" "It is something he feels very readily." "No, I hadn't thought that." "Well, the whole world isn't driven by your appetites, and people who are not feel themselves your superior, naturally. He struggles very hard to make allowances for you. He is not tolerant, but he is charitable. Or perhaps it is the other way around...
|
|
relationships
|
Hilary Mantel |
|
dc22e20
|
I am no one's agent. I am the agent of the law. All the conspiracies pass through my hands. The Committee, you know, draws its present unity from being conspired against. I do not know what would happen if the policy of believing in conspiracies were changed.
|
|
|
Hilary Mantel |
|
91ec48b
|
I know that, if I took your oath, I should be damned." "There are those who would envy your insight," he says, "into the workings of grace. But then, you and God have always been on familiar terms, not so? I wonder how you dare. You talk about your maker as if he were some neighbor you went fishing with on a Sunday afternoon."
|
|
|
Hilary Mantel |
|
88f815e
|
He has never told anyone this story. He doesn't mind talking to Richard, to Rafe about his past--within reason--but he doesn't mean to give away pieces of himself.
|
|
secrets
sense-of-self
|
Hilary Mantel |
|
70c4de9
|
For I chase but one hind, he says, one strange deer timid and wild, and she leads me off the paths that other men have trod, and by myself into the depths of the wood.
|
|
feelings
henry-viii
love
lust
|
Hilary Mantel |
|
526f271
|
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.
|
|
|
Hilary Mantel |
|
b78edd9
|
Christ died to free us from the burden of our sin, but he never, so far as [Sister Philomena] could see, lifted a finger to free us from our stupidity.
|
|
|
Hilary Mantel |
|
da861dd
|
And they say [money's] the root of all evil. Well, Protestants say that. Catholics know better.
|
|
|
Hilary Mantel |
|
d1dc6c3
|
Truth isn't pretty, I thought, and the pursuit of it doesn't make pretty people. Truth isn't elegant; that's just mathematicians' sentimentality. Truth is squalid and full of blots, and you can only find it in the accumulation of dusty and broken facts, in the cellars and sewers of the human mind
|
|
|
Hilary Mantel |
|
5e49b35
|
People romance about their children long before they are born--long before, and long after. They name them and rename them. They see them as their second chances, "a chance to get it right this time," as if they were able to give birth to themselves. They have children to compensate themselves for the things they didn't do or didn't get in their own early life. They conceive be- cause they feel impelled to make up, to a nonexistent person, ..
|
|
|
Hilary Mantel |
|
3ee4b84
|
Children's] lives start long before birth, long before conception, and if they are aborted or miscarried or simply fail to materialise at all, they become ghosts in our lives...The unborn, whether they're named or not, whether or not they're acknowledged, have a way of insisting: a way of making their presence felt.
|
|
|
Hilary Mantel |
|
5660321
|
Jesus Maria,' the boy says. 'The star that guides us to Bethlehem. I thought it was an engine for torture.
|
|
|
Hilary Mantel |
|
d29b3d0
|
I was (an am) unsure about how I am related to my old self, or to myself from year to year. The hormonal profile of an individual determines much of the manifest personality. If you skew the endocrine system,you loose the pathways to the self. When endocrine patterns change it alters the way you think and feel. One shift in the pattern tends to trip another.
|
|
|
Hilary Mantel |
|
8aa4794
|
To gentle pressure, King Henry capitulated; the White Rose, aged twenty-four, was taken out into God's light and air, in order to have his head cut off. But there is always another White Rose; the Plantagenets breed, though not unsupervised. There will always
|
|
|
Hilary Mantel |
|
266244d
|
These are good days for him: every day a fight he can win. "Still serving your Hebrew God, I see," remarks Sir Thomas More. "I mean, your idol Usury." But when More, a scholar revered through Europe, wakes up in Chelsea to the prospect of morning prayers in Latin, he wakes up to a creator who speaks the swift patois of the markets; when More is settling in for a session of self-scourging, he and Rafe are sprinting to Lombard Street to get t..
|
|
|
Hilary Mantel |
|
943d776
|
It is not so important, what happens to the body. I have led in some ways a blessed life. God has been good and not tested me. Now he does I cannot fail him. I have been vigilant over my heart, and I have not always liked what I have found there. If it comes into the hands of the hangman at the last, so be it. It will be in God's hands soon enough.
|
|
life
|
Hilary Mantel |
|
8d823be
|
England is always remaking herself, her cliffs eroding, her sandbanks drifting, springs bubbling up in dead ground. They regroup themselves while we sleep, the landscapes through which we move, and even the histories that trail us; the faces of the dead fade into other faces, as a spine of hills into the mist.
|
|
england
history
time
|
Hilary Mantel |
|
9f1dc1d
|
hypocrisy, fraud, idleness--their worn-out relics, their threadbare worship, and their lack of invention. When did anything good last come from a monastery? They do not invent, they only repeat, and what they repeat is corrupt. 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 writ..
|
|
|
Hilary Mantel |
|
ee0f449
|
Hans nods emphatically, lips pressed together, eyes bright and taunting, like a dog who steals a handkerchief so you will chase
|
|
|
Hilary Mantel |
|
e3c33ce
|
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 synesthetic, and I am haunted by the ghosts of my own sense impressions, which reemerge when I try to write, and shiver between the lines.
|
|
|
Hilary Mantel |
|
5902373
|
Thomas Cromwell is now about fifty years old. He has a labourer's body, stocky, useful, running to fat. He has black hair, greying now, and because of his impermeable skin, which seems designed to resist rain as well as sun, people sneer that his father was an Irishman, though really he was a brewer and a blacksmith at Putney, a shearsman too, a man with a finger in every pie, a scrapper and a brawler, a drunk and a bully, a man often haule..
|
|
|
Hilary Mantel |
|
7c349f6
|
You are familiar, no doubt, with Sebastiano del Piombo's huge painting "The Raising of Lazarus", which hangs in the National Gallery in London, having been purchased in the last century from the Angerstein collection. Against a background of water, arched bridges, and a hot blue sky, a crowd of people -- presumably the neighbours -- cluster about the risen man. Lazarus has turned rather yellow in death, but he is a muscular, well-set-up typ..
|
|
life
life-after-death
|
Hilary Mantel |
|
69a1e45
|
He draws a line under his conclusions. Says, 'Gregory, what should I do about the great worm?' 'Send a commission against it, sir,' the boy says. 'It must be put down.' He gives his son a long look. 'You do know it's Arthur Cobbler's tales?' Gregory gives him a long look back. 'Yes, I do know.' He sounds regretful. 'But it makes people so happy when I believe them.
|
|
|
Hilary Mantel |
|
ba83983
|
But you see, Crumb, it is hard to give up what you have worked at since you were a boy. There were some Italian visitors once, they were cheering us on, Brandon and myself, and they thought that Achilles and Hector had come back to life. So they said.' But which is which? One dragged through the dust by the other ... The king says, 'You turn your boy out beautifully. No nobleman could do more.' 'I don't want him to be Achilles,' he says, 'I..
|
|
|
Hilary Mantel |
|
8f27c98
|
If Mary's blood is Spanish, at least it is royal. And at least she can walk straight and has control of her bowels.
|
|
|
Hilary Mantel |
|
2d4fd83
|
On March 8 Danton mounted the tribune of the Convention. The patriots never forgot the shock of his sudden appearance, nor his face, harrowed by sleepless nights and the exhaustion of traveling, pallid with strain and suffering. Complex griefs caught sometimes at his voice, as he spoke of treason and humiliation; once he stopped and looked at his audience, self-conscious for a moment, and touched the scar on his cheek. With the armies, he h..
|
|
|
Hilary Mantel |