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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| e1e402d | My lord, what do you call a whore when she is a knight's daughter?" "Ah," the cardinal says, entering into the problem. "To her face, 'my lady." | Hilary Mantel | ||
| 0915e55 | When he wakes he has to learn the lack of her all over again | Hilary Mantel | ||
| ad8abdf | The fate of peoples is made like this, two men in small rooms. Forget the coronations, the conclaves of cardinals, the pomp and processions. This is how the world changes: a counter pushed across a table, a pen stroke that alters the force of a phrase, a woman's sigh as she passes and leaves on the air a trail of orange flower or rose water; her hand pulling close the bed curtain, the discreet sigh of flesh against flesh. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| 2b1d829 | Have you ever observed that when a man gets a son he takes all the credit, and when he gets a daughter he blames his wife? And if they do not breed at all, we say it is because her womb is barren. We do not say it is because his seed is bad. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| 2c42e80 | When Wyatt writes, his lines fledge feathers, and unfolding this plumage they dive below their meaning and skim above it. They tell us that the rules of power and the rules of war are the same, the art is to deceive; and you will deceive, and be deceived in your turn, whether you are an ambassador or a suitor. Now, if a man's subject is deception, you are deceived if you think you grasp his meaning. You close your hand as it flies away. A s.. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| 1595eee | I think, if you're going to kill a man, do it. Don't write him a letter about it. Don't bluster and threaten and put him on his guard. | threats | Hilary Mantel | |
| 7248996 | 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 | ||
| f465f80 | 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" | Hilary Mantel | ||
| ba8afbe | 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. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| 6222e78 | He makes a gesture, designed to impersonate frankness. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| 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. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| 819735f | 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. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| 05160ef | 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. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| f9fc05f | 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 | Hilary Mantel | ||
| 83d4a35 | 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. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| dc0f240 | Characters in novels sometimes radiate more energy, therefore, when we don't enter their mind. It is one of the techniques a novelist acquires instinctively--don't go into your protagonist's thoughts until you have something to say about his or her inner life that is more interesting than the reader's suppositions. | Norman Mailer | ||
| 861a234 | Who indeed knows the secret of the earthly pilgrimage? Who knows for what we live, and struggle, and die? Who knows what keeps us living and struggling, while all things break about us? Who knows why the warm flesh of a child is such comfort, when one's own child is lost and cannot be recovered? Wise men write many books, in words too hard to understand. But this, the purpose of our lives, the end of all our struggle, is beyond all human wi.. | cry-the-beloved-country life | Alan Paton | |
| 7dc2b20 | For fear will rob him of all if he gives too much. | Alan Paton | ||
| 21bfbad | Would age now swiftly overtake him? Would this terrible nodding last now for all his days, so that men said aloud in his presence, it is nothing, he is old and does nothing but forget? And would he nod as though he too were saying, Yes, it is nothing, I am old and do nothing but forget? But who would know that he said, I do nothing but remember? | Alan Paton | ||
| 1aebbdd | There's a hard law, mejuffrou, that when a deep injury is done to us, we never recover until we forgive. | forgiveness injury recover recovery | Alan Paton | |
| ce7570d | Therefore let us sell our labour for what it is worth. And if an industry cannot buy our labour, let that industry die. But let us not sell our labour cheap to keep an industry alive. | Alan Paton | ||
| 08a0b07 | Though Trish and her bad boy types weren't exactly Kindra's style, she had to agree that Violet went for quiet and uninteresting. Sort of like mild salsa. Why even bother? You'd be better off just biting a tomato. | girltalk romance | Erin McCarthy | |
| 18e6c1f | He was really having a hard time with this. He was not a seductive kind of guy, and if he tried to be sexy, he was going to sound like Romeo, the porn version. | romeo seductive sexy | Erin McCarthy | |
| 4332c07 | But there was something about Diesel... it started with his name and ended with his butt. | Erin McCarthy | ||
| d4bb2ea | It was like watching two unicorns fucking," he told her. "All glitter and jizz." | Erin McCarthy | ||
| 598c85a | Diesel better have a big dick, that's all she was saying. | dick man | Erin McCarthy | |
| 6462af9 | If he is not the word of God, then God never spoke. | thought-provoking | Cormac McCarthy | |
| 11784c6 | If we were going to die would you tell me? I dont know. We're not going to die. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 57233fd | El le cogio la mano y cruzaron la calle hasta el hotel. Intento leerle el corazon en el apreton de su mano, pero no adivino nada. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| c7eca50 | And maybe no better. There is no government in Mexico. Hell, there's no God in Mexico. Never will be. We are dealing with a people manifestly incapable of governing themselves. And do you know what happens with people who cannot govern themselves? That's right. Others come in to govern for them. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| c08237c | In the night's in their thousands to dream the dreams of a child's imaginings, worlds rich or fearful such as might offer themselves but never the one to be. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| b7220ca | On this road there are no godspoke men. They are gone and I am left and they have taken with them the world. Query: How does the never to be differ from what never was? | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 2ec9908 | The judge watched him. He began to point out various men in the room and to ask if these men were here for a good time or if indeed they knew why they were here at all. Everybody dont have to have a reason to be someplace. That's so, said the judge. They do not have to have a reason. But order is not set aside because of their indifference. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 228d001 | I was a soldier. It is like a dream. When even the bones is gone in the desert the dreams is talk to you, you don't wake up forever. | war | Cormac McCarthy | |
| 81d03ce | Shrouded in the black thunderheads the distant lightning glowed mutely like welding seen through foundry smoke. As if repairs were under way at some flawed place n the iron dark of the world | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| ebb1caa | Riding down the unhorsed Saxons and spearing and clubbing them and leaping from their mounts with knives and running about on the ground with a peculiar bandylegged trot like creatures driven to alien forms of locomotion and stripping the clothes from the dead and seizing them up by the hair and passing their blades about the skulls of the living and the dead alike and snatching aloft the bloody wigs and hacking and chopping at the naked bo.. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| f0a2cd6 | Now the son whose father's existance in this world is historical and speculative even before the son has entered it in a bad way. All his life he carries before him the idol of a perfection to which he can never attain. The father dead has euchered his son of his patrimony. For it is the death of the father to which the son is entitled and to which he is heir, more than his goods.He will not hear of the small mean ways that tempered the man.. | great honor loss novels | Cormac McCarthy | |
| e5173df | Look around you, he said. There is no prophet in the earth's long chronicle who's not honored here today. Whatever form you spoke of you were right. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 3ee09f0 | I want the dead to be dead forever. I don't want to be one of them, Except of course you can't be one of them. You can't be one of the dead because that which, has no existence can have no community. No community! My heart warms just thinking about it-- blackness, aloneness,silence, peace, | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 305500d | If we do not know ourselves in the waking world, what chance in dreams? | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 01cf07c | Trousers rolled to the knee but still they got wet. They tied the rope to a cleat at the rear of the boat and rowed back across the lake, jerking the stump slowly behind them. By then it was already evening. Just the slow periodic rack and shuffle of the oarlocks. The lake dark glass and windowlights coming on along the shore. A radio somewhere. Neither of them had spoken a word. This was the perfect day of childhood. This is the day to sha.. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 2993e03 | Truth has no temperature. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| 18a5c01 | There are other good guys. You said so. Yes. So where are they? They're hiding. Who are they hiding from? From each other. | Cormac McCarthy | ||
| b8b5354 | When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world. | first-lines night parental-love post-apocalypse world | Cormac McCarthy |