01c. 1987 ADIn the first play, the crisis is Thomas More. In the second it’s Anne Boleyn. In the third book, and the third play, it’s crisis every day, an overlapping series of only just negotiable horrors. It’s climbing and climbing. Then a sudden abrupt fall - within days.Hilary Mantel / quote ↗
02c. 1987 ADYou come to this place, mid-life. You don’t know how you got here, but suddenly you’re staring fifty in the face. When you turn and look back down the years, you glimpse the ghosts of other lives you might have led; all houses are haunted. The wraiths and phantoms creep under your carpets and between the warp and weft of fabric, they lurk in wardrobes and lie flat under drawer-liners. You think of the children you might have had but didn’t. When the midwife says, ‘It’s a boy,’ where does the girl go? When you think you’re pregnant, and you’re not, what happens to the child that has already formed in your mind? You keep it filed in a drawer of your consciousness, like a short story that never worked after the opening lines.Hilary Mantel / quote ↗
03c. 1987 ADInnocence is a bleeding wound without a bandage, a wound that opens with every casual knock from casual passers-by. Experience is an armour.Hilary Mantel / quote ↗
04c. 1987 ADFor 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.Hilary Mantel / quote ↗
05c. 1987 ADTo his inner ear, the cardinal speaks. He says, I saw you, Crumb, when you were at Elvetham: scratching your balls in the dawn and wondering at the violence of the king’s whims. If he wants a new wife, fix him one. I didn’t, and I am dead.Hilary Mantel / quote ↗
06c. 1987 ADA 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.Hilary Mantel / quote ↗
07c. 1987 ADWhat is the nature of the border between truth and lies? It is permeable and blurred because it is planted thick with rumour, confabulation, misunderstandings and twisted tales. Truth can break the gates down, truth can howl in the street; unless truth is pleasing, personable and easy to like, she is condemned to stay whimpering at the back door.Hilary Mantel / quote ↗
08c. 1987 ADTalking 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, and you will find it overturned; offer yesterday’s conviction, and today you’ll find it shredded. What did Mirabeau complain of? He believes everything he says. Presumably there was some layer of Robespierre, some deep stratum, where all the contradictions were resolved.Hilary Mantel / quote ↗
09c. 1987 ADI once had every hope,’ he says. ‘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 a glass. The spectacles of pain and disgrace I see around me, the ignorance, the unthinking vice, the poverty and the lack of hope, and oh, the rain – the rain that falls on England and rots the grain, puts out the light in a man's eye and the light of learning too, for who can reason if Oxford is a giant puddle and Cambridge is washing away downstream, and who will enforce the laws if the judges are swimming for their lives? Last week the people were rioting in York. Why would they not, with wheat so scarce, and twice the price of last year? I must stir up the justices to make examples, I suppose, otherwise the whole of the north will be out with billhooks and pikes, and who will they slaughter but each other? I truly believe I should be a better man if the weather were better. I should be a better man if I lived in a commonwealth where the sun shone and the citizens were rich and free. If only that were true, Master More, you wouldn't have to pray for me nearly as hard as you do.Hilary Mantel / quote ↗
10c. 1987 ADI picked up a snake once. In Italy.""Why did you do that?""For a bet.""Was it poisonous?""We didn't know. That was the point of the bet.""Did it bite you?""Of course.""Why of course?""It wouldn't be much of a story, would it? If I'd put it down unharmed, and away it slid?Hilary Mantel / quote ↗
11c. 1987 ADWhen Gregory says, ‘Are they guilty?’ he means, ‘Did they do it?’ But when he says, ‘Are they guilty?’ he means, ‘Did the court find them so?’ The lawyer’s world is entire unto itself, the human pared away.Hilary Mantel / quote ↗
12c. 1987 ADIt is not easy to talk about a condition once dismissed as ‘the career women’s disease’. But women will continue to suffer until we realise the cost of ignoring itHilary Mantel / quote ↗
13c. 1987 ADThe old always think the world is getting worse; it is for the young, equipped with historical facts, to point out that, compared with 1509, or even 1939, life in 2009 is sweet as honey.Hilary Mantel / quote ↗
14c. 1987 ADLife do your worst; we are plump of knee and mild of eye, we are douce, glib and blithe; we inherit the semi, while others inherit the wind.Hilary Mantel / quote ↗
15c. 1987 ADWhen a man admits guilt we have to believe him. We cannot set ourselves to proving to him that he is wrong. Otherwise the law courts would never function.Hilary Mantel / quote ↗
17c. 1987 ADThis is Maximilien de Robespierre, barrister-at-law: unmarried, personable, a young man with all his life before him. Today against his most deeply held convictions he has followed the course of the law and sentenced a criminal to death. And now he is going to pay for it.Hilary Mantel / quote ↗
18c. 1987 ADLaw of Suspects. Suspects are those: who have in any way aided tyranny (royal tyranny, Brissotin tyranny...); who cannot show that they have performed their civic duties; who do not starve, and yet have no visible means of support; who have been refused certificates of citizenship by their Sections; who have been removed from public office by the Convention or its representatives; who belong to an aristocratic family, and have not given proof of constant and extraordinary revolutionary fervor; or who have emigrated.Hilary Mantel / quote ↗
19c. 1987 ADFabre looked up, his mobile face composed. "Good-bye," he said. "Georges-Jacques--study law. Law is a weapon.Hilary Mantel / quote ↗
20c. 1987 ADHe looked the Prince up and down, like a hangman taking his measurements. 'Of course there will be a revolution,' he said. 'You are making a nation of Cromwells. But we can go beyond Cromwell, I hope. In fifteen years you tyrants and parasites will be gone. We shall have set up a republic, on the purest Roman model.Hilary Mantel / quote ↗
21c. 1987 ADYour fear is, that if you marry Adèle, 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 because of another kind of love, isn’t it, that the duty is laid upon you?Hilary Mantel / quote ↗
22c. 1987 ADI daresay something will happen, between now and ’91, to make your fortunes look up.Hilary Mantel / quote ↗
23c. 1987 ADHe runs his eye along the row of knives in their racks, the cleavers for splitting bones. He picks one up, looks at its edge, decides it needs sharpening and says, "Do you think I look like a murderer? In your good opinion?"A silence. After a while, Thurston proffers, "At this moment, master, I would have to say...Hilary Mantel / quote ↗
24c. 1987 ADHe 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.Hilary Mantel / quote ↗
