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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 3946026 | Bargain all you like. Consign yourself to the hangman if you must. The people don't give a fourpenny fuck." 512" | Hilary Mantel | ||
| bd857d0 | 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.. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| b88f213 | Edward Seymour says, 'You should have been a bishop, Cromwell.' 'Edward,' he says, 'I should have been Pope. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| 56bf54b | 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. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| da7662f | 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. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| 4cf78a4 | I know she's rather plain, but every girl has a right to conceal that fact from people who haven't seen her. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| e1ba4b8 | 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. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| 747304c | They claim they're living the vita apostolica; but you didn't find the apostles feeling each other's bollocks. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| c15dc2a | 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 .. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| 4b34086 | 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. | henry-viii humor sex | Hilary Mantel | |
| d328d39 | 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. | lies revisionist-history | Hilary Mantel | |
| 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. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| 4d80b59 | Writing's like running downhill; can't stop if you want to. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| b3b6ef8 | And they were always young, Air Corps pilots and ensigns, and good-looking girls in fur coats, and always the government secretary or two, the working girl as a carry-over from the fraternity parties when she was always the girl who could be made because in some mysterious way the women of the lower classes could be depended upon to copulate like jack rabbits. And they all knew they were going to die soon with a sentimental and unstated Eng.. | Norman Mailer | ||
| 7a0aecf | City Point is so beautiful, she says. In the night they cannot see the garbage that litters the beach, the seaweed and driftwood, the condoms that wallow sluggishly on the foam's edge, discarded on the shore like the minuscule loathsome animals of the sea. Yeah, it's something, he says slowly. | Norman Mailer | ||
| ae3e38e | And in the complicated, relished, introspective web of young lovers, or more exactly, young petters, they progress along the oldest channel in the world and the most deceptive, for they are certain it is unique to them. Even as they are calling themselves engaged, they are losing the details of their subtle involved pledging of a troth. They are moved and warmed by intimacies between them, by long husky conversations in the parlor, in inexp.. | Norman Mailer | ||
| 22a5894 | It takes all kinds to make a world. | Norman Mailer | ||
| 272777c | The moments like these, the passing doubts, were the temptations that caught you if you were not careful. | Norman Mailer | ||
| 84c811b | His decision had been made in the valley, and it lay as an iron warp in his mind. He could have turned back no more easily than he could have killed himself. | Norman Mailer | ||
| 5c00839 | Yank! Yank! We you come to get Yank. We you come to get. | war | Norman Mailer | |
| 16131cb | There was the old myth of divine intervention. You blasphemed, and a lightning bolt struck you. That was a little steep too. If punishment is at all proportionate to the offense, then power becomes watered. The only way you generate the proper attitude of awe and obedience is through immense and disproportionate power. | Norman Mailer | ||
| a80c829 | A fire had begun to spread in me. It was burning now in my stomach and my lungs were dry as old leaves, my heart had a herded pressure which gave promise to explode. | Norman Mailer | ||
| 86cbe06 | So you come soon to power, but you have merely inherited the crisis and yours is the profit of cancer. | Norman Mailer | ||
| 8a30cc4 | His deepest detestation was often reserved for the nicest of liberal academics, as if their lives were his own life but a step escaped. Like the scent of the void which comes off the pages of a Xerox copy, so was he always depressed in such homes by their hint of oversecurity. If the republic was now managing to convert the citizenry to a plastic mass, ready to be attached to any manipulative gung ho, the author was ready to cast much of th.. | Norman Mailer | ||
| 690d99e | rip the prisons open put the convicts on television | convicts criminal criminals guilty jail prison prisoners prisons television tv usa | Norman Mailer | |
| a805315 | Listen my love the hour is late my side has an ache If you don't get a taxi my heart will break | Norman Mailer | ||
| c482653 | As the Maestro is never loath to tell us, a human who suffers from too much ambition succeeds only in exemplifying the Creator's own lack of anticipation. The D.K., wishing His Vision to be innovative, had created the human will as an instinct all but free of Him. Once again, God had miscalculated. | Norman Mailer | ||
| f5754a8 | Sometimes I think our future existence will depend on whether we can keep false information from proliferating too rapidly. If our power to verify the facts does not keep pace, then distortions of information will eventually choke us. | Norman Mailer | ||
| c4afcdb | Just as a fighter has to feel that he possesses the right to do physical damage to another man, so a writer has to be ready to take chances with his readers' lives. | Norman Mailer | ||
| 894637c | I tell you, say the rich, the poor are naught but dirty wind welling in air-shafts over the cinders and droppings of the past, their voices thick with grease and ordure, sewer-greed to corrode the ear with the horrors of the past and the voids of new stupidity. One could drown waiting for the poor to make one fine distinction. Yes, destroy us say the rich and you lose the roots of God. | rich squalor wealth | Norman Mailer | |
| f04aa91 | Uma vez, numa escola de provincia, a professora de Historia lembrou-se de perguntar aos alunos o que queriam ser quando fossem grandes. Todos responderam coisas excelentes, taisw como advogados, medicos, accionistas da Texas Oil. Apenas o pequeno Norman, o abstruso da classe, declarou com suavidade que queria ser outra coisa: empregado de escritorio. (O que muito chocou a professora e lautas gargalhadas proporcionou aos colegas.) Hoje sao t.. | Rui Zink | ||
| cedf364 | Perhaps the measure of the best art is that it does not excite envy. | Norman Mailer | ||
| 6382a7b | There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, that one must grow or else pay more for remaining the same. | Norman Mailer | ||
| 6dc2f8f | The Creator had His relative successes and His abysmal failures. While it must be admitted that He never gave up, even if He was not always in firm control of the earth He had fashioned, it is also incontestable that earthquakes and ice ages brought many an interruption to His experiments and savaged many of His pursuits. Why? Because He had incorrectly designed this globe of earth in the first place. | Norman Mailer | ||
| 0544f8f | I will now make an apology, although I will do my best not to repeat it. (Good readers do not read fiction, after all, to put up with the author's regrets.) I will say that having read the best and worst of novels for many years, which is, to remind you, part of a good devil's education, I know by now that not even a loyal reader can stay true to an author who is ready to leave his narrative for an apparently unrelated expedition. | Norman Mailer | ||
| 1e931cc | Years ago in 1959 when Dellinger was already an editor on Liberation (then an anarchist-pacifist magazine, of worthy but not very readable articles in more or less vegetarian prose) Mailer had submitted a piece, after some solicitation, on the contrast between real obscenity in advertising, and alleged obscenity in four-letter words. The piece was no irreplaceable work of prose, and in fact was eventually inserted quietly into his book, Adv.. | Norman Mailer | ||
| e8158a2 | Metaphor reveals a writer's true grasp of life. To the degree that you have no metaphor, you have not yet lived much of a life. | Norman Mailer | ||
| 9a4d0b0 | It is not uncommon for fighters' camps to be gloomy. In heavy training, fighters live in dimensions of boredom others do not begin to contemplate. Fighters are supposed to. The boredom creates an impatience with one's life, and a violence to improve it. Boredom creates a detestation for losing. | boxing fighters training | Norman Mailer | |
| bab2948 | All roads lead to Johannesburg. If you are white or if you are black they lead to Johannesburg. If the crops fail, there is work in Johannesburg. If there are taxes to be paid, there is work in Johannesburg. If the farm is too small to be divided further, some must go to Johannesburg. If there is a child to be born that must be delivered in secret, it can be delivered in Johannesburg. | alan-paton cry-the-beloved-country | Alan Paton | |
| c2c96ed | Have you a room that you could let?" "Yes, I have a room that I could let, but I do not want to let it. I have only two rooms, and there are six of us already, and the boys and girls are growing up. But school books cost money, and my husband is ailing, and when he is well it is only thirty-five shillings a week. And six shillings of that is for the rent, and three shillings of that is for the rent, and three shillings for travelling, and a.. | alan-paton cry-the-beloved-country south-africa | Alan Paton | |
| 48c79b8 | It was to the small serious boy that he turned for his enjoyment. He had bought the child some cheap wooden blocks, and with these the little one played endlessly and intently, with a purpose obscure to the adult mind, but completely absorbing. | cry-the-beloved-country | Alan Paton | |
| 92e96b8 | But there is only one thing that has power completely, and that is love. Because when a man loves, he seeks no power, and therefore he has power. I see only one hope for our country, and that is when white men and black men, desiring neither power nor money, but desiring only the good of their country, come together to work for it. He was grave and silent, and then he said somberly, I have one great fear in my heart, that one day when they .. | Alan Paton | ||
| 2d14cb9 | Deep down the fear of a man who lives in a world not made for him, whose own world is slipping away, dying, being destroyed, beyond any recall. | Alan Paton | ||
| 11e7217 | Nothing is every quiet, except for fools. | Alan Paton |