The collection / 118 fragments

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Passages, proverbs, and questions carried across the ages.

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118 results · Page 5 of 5Play this collection ▷

01c. 1987 AD

Do you look like the photograph on your book jackets? Authors, I find, seldom do.

Hilary Mantel / quote

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02c. 1987 AD

As the year goes on, certain deputies—and others, high in public life—will appear unshaven, without coat or cravat; or they will jettison these marks of the polite man, when the temperature rises. They affect the style of men who begin their mornings with a splash under a backyard pump, and who stop off at their street-corner bar for a nip of spirits on their way to ten hours’ manual labor. Citizen Robespierre, however, is a breathing rebuketo these men; he retains his buckled shoes, his striped coat of olive green. Can it be the same coat that he wore in the first year of the Revolution? He is not profligate with coats.While Citizen Danton tears off the starched linen that fretted his thick neck, Citizen Saint-Just’s cravat grows ever higher, stiffer, more wonderful to behold. He affects a single earring, but he resembles less a corsair than a slightly deranged merchant banker.

Hilary Mantel / quote

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03c. 1987 AD

Cravats grow higher, as if they mean to protect the throat. The highest cravats in public life will be worn by Citizen Antoine Saint-Just, of the National Convention and the Committee of Public Safety. In the dark and harrowing days of ’94, an obscene feminine inversion will appear: a thin crimson ribbon, worn round a bare white neck.

Hilary Mantel / quote

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04c. 1987 AD

He knows different now. It's the living that chase the dead. The long bones and skulls are tumbled from their shrouds, and words like stones thrust into their rattling mouths: we edit their writings, we rewrite their lives. Thomas More had spread the rumor that Little Bilney, chained to the stake, had recanted as the fire was set. It wasn't enough for him to take Bilney's life away; he had to take his death too.

Hilary Mantel / quote

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05c. 1987 AD

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.

Hilary Mantel / quote

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06c. 1987 AD

Abroad? Oh no. I went to England in ’91, and you stood in the garden at Fontenay and berated me.” He shook his head. “This is my nation. Here I stay. A man can’t carry his country on the soles of his shoes.

Hilary Mantel / quote

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07c. 1987 AD

One summer at the fag end of the nineties, I had to go out of London to talk to a literary society, of the sort that must have been old-fashioned when the previous century closed. When the day came, I wondered why I'd agreed to it; but yes is easier than no, and of course when you make a promise you think the time will never arrive: that there will be a nuclear holocaust, or something else diverting.

Hilary Mantel / quote

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08c. 1987 AD

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 / quote

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09c. 1987 AD

The gift blesses the giver.

Hilary Mantel / quote

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10c. 1987 AD

The door was flung open. Maurice Duplay filled it; energetic master, shirt- sleeves rolled up. He threw out his arms, the good Jacobin Duplay, and formed a sentence totally original, something which had never been uttered in the history of the world: “Camille, you have a son, and your wife is very well, and is asking you to be at home, right now.

Hilary Mantel / quote

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11c. 1987 AD

It's just that you are practiced at persuading, and sometimes it's quite difficult, sir to distinguish being persuaded by you from being knocked down in street and stamped on.Pg.406

Hilary Mantel / quote

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12c. 1987 AD

He looks around at his guests. All are prepared. A Latin grace; English would be his choice, but he will suit his company. Who cross themselves ostentatiously, in papist style. Who look at him, expectant. He shouts for the waiters. The doors burst open. Sweating men heave the platters to the table. It seems the meat is fresh, in fact not slaughtered yet. It is just a minor breach of etiquette. The company must sit and salivate. The Boleyns are laid at his hand to be carved.

Hilary Mantel / quote

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13c. 1987 AD

You mustn't stand about. Come home with me to dinner.’‘No.’ More shakes his head. ‘I would rather be blown around on the river and go home hungry. If I could trust you only to put food in my mouth – but you will put words into it.

Hilary Mantel / quote

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14c. 1987 AD

Is a woman bound to wifely obedience, when the result will be to turn her out of the estate of wife?

Hilary Mantel / quote

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15c. 1987 AD

Cardinal Campeggio has implored Katherine to bow to the king's will, accept that her marriage is invalid and retire to a convent. Certainly, she says sweetly, she will become a nun: if the king will become a monk.

Hilary Mantel / quote

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16c. 1987 AD

The prose,” Robespierre said. “It’s so clean, no conceits, no show, no wit. He means every word. Formerly, you see, he meant every other word. That was his style.

Hilary Mantel / quote

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17c. 1987 AD

Full bellies breed gentle manners. The pinch of famine makes monsters.

Hilary Mantel / quote

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18c. 1987 AD

I didn't cry much after I was 35, but staggered stony-faced into middle age, a handkerchief still in my bag just in case.

Hilary Mantel / quote

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19c. 1987 AD

History offers us vicarious experience. It allows the youngest student to possess the ground equally with his elders; without a knowledge of history to give him a context for present events, he is at the mercy of every social misdiagnosis handed to him.

Hilary Mantel / quote

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20c. 1987 AD

History is always changing behind us, and the past changes a little every time we retell it.

Hilary Mantel / quote

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21c. 1987 AD

Once you're labeled as mentally ill, and that's in your medical notes, then anything you say can be discounted as an artefact of your mental illness.

Hilary Mantel / quote

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22c. 1987 AD

Fiction leaves us so much work to do, allows the individual so much input; you have to see, you have to hear, you have to taste the madeleine, and while you are seemingly passive in your chair, you have to travel.

Hilary Mantel / quote

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