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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 37b8d6f | But Christendom was overturned for the Boleyn marriage, to put the ginger pig in the cradle; | Hilary Mantel | ||
| 94f1aa3 | The year now is 1774. Poseurs or not, it is time to grow up. It is time to enter the public realm, the world of public acts and public attitudes. Everything that happens now will happen in the light of history. It is not a midday luminary, but a corpse-candle to the intellect; at best, it is a secondhand lunar light, error-breeding, sand-blind and parched. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| e75896e | I daresay something will happen, between now and '91, to make your fortunes look up. | revolution | Hilary Mantel | |
| c86bdc4 | God knows," Charpentier said, "I like the present scheme of things very little, but I dread to think what will happen if the conduct of reform falls into hands like yours." "Reform?" Camille said. "I'm not talking about reform. The city will explode this summer." | Hilary Mantel | ||
| 2dc6b01 | The Revolution is your bride," he said. "As the Church is the Bride of Christ." | Hilary Mantel | ||
| d9b7ca4 | But just as everything was going along politely, quietly and wonderfully -- in poured Citizen Danton and his crew. | humour | Hilary Mantel | |
| d4788dd | You once told me, when you visited my house, how Anne conducts herself with men: she says, "Yes, yes, yes, yes, no."' Wyatt nods; he recognises those words; he looks sorry he spoke them. 'Now you may have to transpose one word of that testimony. Yes, yes, yes, no, yes." | trial | Hilary Mantel | |
| bdd1200 | Young Surrey now lays down his knife and begins to complain. Noblemen, he laments, are not respected as they were in the days when England was great. The present king keeps about himself a collection of men of base degree, and no good will come of it. Cranmer creeps forward in his chair, as if to intervene, but Surrey gives him a glare that says, you're exactly who I mean, archbishop. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| 15956d6 | The Robespierre women (as one tended to think of them now) were all on display. Madame looked actively, rather intimidatingly benevolent; it was her aim in life to find a Jacobin who was hungry, then to go into the kitchen and make extravagant efforts, and say, "I have fed a patriot!"." | humour | Hilary Mantel | |
| e707231 | Men like Carew, he knows, tend to blame him, Cromwell, for Anne's rise in the world; he facilitated it, he broke the old marriage and let in the new. He does not expect them to soften to him, to include him in their companionship; he only wants them not to spit in his dinner. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| 3c40349 | At the top of the Queen's Staircase at the Tuileries, there is a series of communicating chambers, crowded every day with clerks, secretaries, messengers, with army officers and purveyors, officials of the Commune and officers of the courts: with government couriers, booted and spurred, waiting for dispatches from the last room in the suite. Look down: outside there are cannon and files of soldiers. The room at the end was once the private .. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| 90a8285 | When Stephen comes into a room, the furnishings shrink from him. Chairs scuttle backwards. Joint-stools flatten themselves like pissing bitches. The woollen Bible figures in the king's tapestries lift their hands to cover their ears. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| 5d3f8cf | May 29, the Central Committee of the Sections goes into "permanent session" -- what a fine, crisis-ridden sound it has, that term!" | humour | Hilary Mantel | |
| 87803a6 | And if a diversion is needed, why not arrest a general? Arthur Dillon is a friend of eminent deputies, a contender for the post of Commander-in-Chief of the Northern Front; he has proved himself at Valmy and in a halfdozen actions since. In the National Assembly he was a liberal; now he is a republican. Isn't it then logical that he should be thrown into gaol, July 1, on suspicion of passing military secrets to the enemy? | irony | Hilary Mantel | |
| 0bbaf08 | I think back to those days after the Bastille fell, the Mercure Nationale run from the back of the shop, that little Louise sticking her well-bred nose in the air and flouncing off to bawl out their printer--and you know, he was a good lad, Francois. I'd say, 'Go and do this, this, this, go and tie some bricks to your boots and jump in the Seine,' and he'd"-- Danton touched an imaginary forelock--'right away, Georges-Jacques, and do you nee.. | humour | Hilary Mantel | |
| 96434e2 | Herault, Fabre thinks: and his mind drifts back--as it tends to, these days-- to the Cafe du Foy. He'd been giving readings from his latest--Augusta was dying the death at the Italiens--and in came this huge, rough-looking boy, shoe-horned into a lawyer's black suit, whom he'd made a sketch of in the street, ten years before. The boy had developed this upper-class drawl, and he'd talked about Herault--"his looks are impeccable, he's well tr.. | reminiscence | Hilary Mantel | |
| 71966cb | Again, take someone who's crippled or deformed; they can't be tied to the plank without a lot of sweat and heaving, and then the crowds (who can't see much anyway) get bored and start hissing and catcalling. Meanwhile a queue builds up, and the people at the end of the queue get awkward and start screaming or passing out. If all the clients were young, male, stoical and fit, he'd have fewer problems, but it's surprising how few of them fall.. | french-revolution guillotine | Hilary Mantel | |
| f5c4428 | I tell you, dear Citizen Camille--it's not the deaths I can't stand. It's the judgements, the judgements in the courtroom. | terror | Hilary Mantel | |
| e43a3ee | He stepped back, looked up. Cut into the stone above his head were the words RUE MARAT. For a moment he had the urge to turn back around the corner, climb the stairs, shout to the servants not to bother unpacking, they'd be returning to Arcis in the morning. He looked up to the lighted windows above his head. If I go up there, he thought, I'll never be free again. If I go up there I commit myself to Max, to joining with him to finish Hebert.. | politicsics | Hilary Mantel | |
| eb17cee | There was a man called Chaumette, scruffy and sharp-featured. He hated the aristocrats and he also hated prostitutes, and the two things used to get quite confused in his mind. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| a945977 | The visitor sees the hospital as needles and knives, metal teeth, metal bars; sees the foggy meeting between the damp summer air outside and the overheated exhalations of the sick room. But the patient sees no such contrast. She cannot imagine the street, the motorway. To her the hospital is this squashed pillow, this water glass: this bell pull, and the nice judgement required to know when to ring it. For the visitor everything points outw.. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| a734e44 | my great-aunts and uncles died in wards like those. Wrapping and muffling themselves, gazing at the long windows streaming rain, visitors would tell the patient: 'You're in the best place. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| 22c196d | Death stays when the visitors have gone, and the nurses turn a blind eye; he leans back on his portable throne, he crosses his legs, he says, 'Entertain me. | Hilary Mantel | ||
| 043482a | ttSf lns bljnwn. l 'jd klm@ tnsb 'kthr .. lys b`D lns, wlys ns kthyrt. lns mjnwnt | Gillian Flynn | ||
| 9672716 | There is nothing safe about sex. There never will be." Norman Mailer" | Young | ||
| 3dddb64 | He had been given the job and he was going to do it. But now for the first time he hated it genuinely. Perhaps there had been too many fatigue-products, perhaps the cumulative labor had dissolved and reshaped the structures of his mind, but in any case he was wretched with this work, and as a corollary he understood suddenly that he had always hated the drudgery of his farm work, the unending monotonous struggle against an arid unyielding s.. | Norman Mailer | ||
| 543d23f | Aukeman quotes Norman Mailer: "No wonder then that these have been the years of conformity and depression. A stench of fear has come out of every pore of American life and we suffer from a collective failure or nerve. The only courage, with rare exceptions, that we have been witness to, has been the isolated courage of isolated people." Welcome to Painterland (2016) Chapter 4, p.108" | fear mailer norman-mailer | Anastasia Aukeman | |
| 18b449b | For the first time in civilized history, perhaps for the first time in all of history, we have been forced to live with the suppressed knowledge that the smallest facets of our personality or the most minor projection of our ideas, or indeed the absence of ideas and the absence of personality could mean equally well that we might still be doomed to die as a cipher in some vast statistical operation in which our teeth would be counted, and o.. | Norman Mailer | ||
| bb9c37e | He was drinking and contemplating his fear. It seemed to him that he had been afraid all his life, but in recent years, or so it seemed, he had learned how to take a step into his fear, how to take the action which frightened him most (and so could free him the most). He did not do it always, who could? but he had come to think that the secret to growth was to be brave a little more than one was cowardly, simple as that, indeed | Norman Mailer | ||
| 6bb3cbd | It seemed to him that he had been afraid all his life, but in recent years, or so it seemed, he had learned how to take a step into his fear, how to take the action which frightened him most (and so could free him the most). He did not do it always, who could? but he had come to think that the secret to growth was to be brave a little more than one was cowardly, simple as that, indeed | Norman Mailer | ||
| edfabc8 | When you start to open a door, the pressure has to be greatest in the beginning, yet the door moves the least. | Norman Mailer | ||
| 5ecde6e | One's own literary work was the only answer to the war in Vietnam. | Norman Mailer | ||
| 637af80 | who seemed to have grown his afro to new and previously unexplored heights, inspiring Norman Mailer to write that King looked like a man falling down an elevator shaft, "whoosh went the hair up from his head" | Jonathan Eig | ||
| 9adbbbe | She was a good girl, he said to himself. He was thinking without quite phrasing it that no other person had ever understood him so fully, and he felt a secret relief as he realized that she had understood him and still loved him. | Norman Mailer | ||
| ebd987c | His nerves were more keyed than he had realized. "Quit the bitching and let's go," he heard himself piping. He was damn tired of them, he realized suddenly. "That sonofabitch," one of them muttered. It shocked him, and generated resentment. He repressed it, however. What they were doing was understandable enough. In the fatigue of the march, they had to have someone to blame, and no matter what he did they would hate him sooner or later. Hi.. | Norman Mailer | ||
| f6f43eb | The more a man can achieve, the more he may be certain that the devil will inhabit a part of his creation. --NORMAN MAILER | Kevin Fedarko | ||
| 5700c8d | There was a way, of course, to deal with the papers. If the ears of the reporters were geared to capture accurately the mediocre remarks of mediocre men, then one had to look for simple salient statements, so poetically bare, but so irreducible, that they would stick in the reporter's mind like a thorn. | Norman Mailer | ||
| fc0aff6 | There is a paradox at the core of penology, and from it derives the thousand ills and afflictions of the prison system. It is that not only the worst of the young are sent to prison, but the best--that is, the proudest, the bravest, the most daring, the most enterprising and the most undefeated of the poor. There starts the horror. --Norman Mailer's introduction to In the Belly of the Beast by Jack Henry Abbott No one knows what it's like t.. | Stephen Hunter | ||
| 46eda61 | Kate Millet looked to literature for examples of misogyny. She isolated the trio of D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller and Norman Mailer as the worst culprits. | Cathia Jenainati | ||
| 783f72a | I was in love with a beautiful, brilliant girl who was married to the most elegant and incisive gent I had ever met; there was no hope for me but, oh, the love was beautiful. Mr. | Norman Mailer | ||
| 2746ca0 | Happiness is experienced most directly in the intervals between terror. | Norman Mailer | ||
| 9b86ee9 | I've never been to the Playboy mansion," he wrote, "but Thyme Hill must make Hugh Hefner look like a spinster having a few lady friends in for tea." He" | Norman Mailer | ||
| 355f084 | I heard her calling to me from caverns so deep in herself she was never aware of her own voice. | Norman Mailer | ||
| 7df2987 | Since he had, in contrast to his delivery, a big burly squared-off bulk of a body which gave hint of the methodical ruthlessness of more than one Russian bureaucrat, Von Braun's relatively small voice, darting eyes, and semaphoric presentations of lip made it obvious he was a man of opposites. He | Norman Mailer |