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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 02bfbb4 | 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. | ch-visitation | Hilary Mantel | |
| 16e65a0 | 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.. | politics | Hilary Mantel | |
| 0e07774 | 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. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| 662569c | 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. | dreams fear funny nightmares | Hilary Mantel | |
| c2af60a | 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. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| 7f9eb16 | 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.. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| 26d47a6 | 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. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| 797ad19 | 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" | Hilary Mantel | ||
| 665b54b | 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.. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| e8616b5 | 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? | Hilary Mantel | ||
| 8ade0f8 | 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.. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| e0e1001 | 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; .. | writing-craft writing-life writing-process | Hilary Mantel | |
| 88149e8 | 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. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| 03ddfd9 | 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? | Hilary Mantel | ||
| 1d276d2 | 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." | Hilary Mantel | ||
| 2a55660 | 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. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| 067fdb0 | 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. | humour | Hilary Mantel | |
| 932c62c | 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." | Hilary Mantel | ||
| 4192365 | 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.. | patria revolution | Hilary Mantel | |
| 7a98510 | Gradually, you see, our people are coming into the power they have always thought is their due. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| c661575 | 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? | humour | Hilary Mantel | |
| 2eb7e9f | 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? | Hilary Mantel | ||
| 24fe7d3 | 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, .. | french-revolution | Hilary Mantel | |
| a28ba37 | 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. | french-revolution | Hilary Mantel | |
| f717648 | 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.. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| cb58282 | 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. | politics | Hilary Mantel | |
| 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." | Hilary Mantel | ||
| 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.. | history robespierre | Hilary Mantel | |
| a73650a | Where, in what cemetery of the heavens, did the tender words of lovers rest when they loved no longer? | Norman Mailer | ||
| adc234a | Or, obversely, he might kill a man himself. It would be a question of throwing up his rifle, pressing the trigger, and a particular envelope of lusts and anxieties and perhaps some goodness would be quite dead. All as easy as stepping on an insect, perhaps easier...Everything was completely out of whack, none of the joints fitted. The men had been singing in the motor pool, and there had been something nice about it, something childish and .. | wwii | Norman Mailer | |
| 9ee5a40 | By the time his political career began, he was in command of an artwork of lies elaborate enough to support his smallest need. He could shave the truth by a hair or subvert it altogether. | Norman Mailer | ||
| 74cf5ab | It aroused my paranoia (which is always there in ready supply, since it is preferable to poor powers of anticipation). | Norman Mailer | ||
| 24df0d8 | It was better than floods of misery that a son of her flesh had killed the sons of other mothers. That burned in her heart like the pain which flared in the arthritis of her knees. Pain was a boring conversationalist who never stopped, just found new topics. Bess | Norman Mailer | ||
| db6f607 | There remained a hole drilled through his heart. | Norman Mailer | ||
| b42e3f1 | Mediocrities flock to any movement which will indulge their self-pity and their self-righteousness, for without a Movement the mediocrity is on the slide into terminal melancholia. | Norman Mailer | ||
| 79dc6eb | There was that law of life, so cruel and so just, that one must grow old or else pay more for remaining the same. | Norman Mailer | ||
| 3c35d37 | not for nothing had Lenin pointed out that there were ten years which passed like an uneventful day, but there was also the revolutionary day which was like ten years. | Norman Mailer | ||
| b7c2d01 | country people do not have enough to do with their minds. Their backs are strong, but their lives--year after year, it is the same. They are tired of being bored. So they start to think about the wrongs that have been done to them. | Norman Mailer | ||
| e341a5d | Mi resi conto, allora, che l'unico vero collaudo della forza - del tono muscolare, per cosi dire - della sanita mentale e la capacita di sostenere l'urto di un interrogativo dietro l'altro senza che vi sia neanche l'ombra di una risposta. | Norman Mailer | ||
| f2fbc71 | Turn the light on so your aim is better," he said mildly. "All you did was waste a full beer." | Erin McCarthy | ||
| 53b21f9 | Aye, but the hand that had murdered had once pressed the mother's breast into the thirsting mouth, had stolen into the father's hand when they went out into the dark. Aye, but the murderer afraid of death had once been a child afraid of the night. | Alan Paton | ||
| e997d3a | It is the duty of a judge to do justice, but it is only the people who can be just | Alan Paton | ||
| 56f2001 | His son had gone astray in the great city, where so many others had gone astray before him, and where many others would go astray after him, until there was found some great secret that as yet no man had discovered. | Alan Paton | ||
| cda3e7f | There are many sides to this difficult problem. And people persist in discussing soil-erosion, and tribal decay, and lack of schools, and crime, as though they were all parts of the matter. If you think long enough about it, you will be brought to consider republics, and bilingualism, and immigration, and Palestine, and God knows what. So in a way it is best not to think about it at all. | Alan Paton |