Prashant Wadnere > Prashant's Quotes

“It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.”
― Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

“He thinks, I remembered you, Thomas More, but you didn't remember me. You never even saw me coming.”
― Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

“Over the city lies the sweet, rotting odor of yesterday's unrecollected sins.”
― Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

“Arrange your face”
― Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

“Why are we so attached to the severities of the past? Why are we so proud of having endured our fathers and our mothers, the fireless days and the meatless days, the cold winters and the sharp tongues? It's not as if we had a choice.”
― Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

“But it is no use to justify yourself. It is no good to explain. It is weak to be anecdotal. It is wise to conceal the past even if there is nothing to conceal. A man's power is in the half-light, in the half-seen movements of his hand and the unguessed-at expression of his face. It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.”
― Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

“Suppose within each book there is another book, and within every letter on every page another volume constantly unfolding; but these volumes take no space on the desk. Suppose knowledge could be reduced to a quintessence, held within a picture, a sign, held within a place which is no place. Suppose the human skull were to become capacious, spaces opening inside it, humming chambers like beehives.”
― Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

“It is almost a joke, but a joke that nobody tells.”
― Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

“No ruler in the history of the world has ever been able to afford a war. They're not affordable things. No prince ever says, 'This is my budget, so this is the kind of war I can have.”
― Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

“The fate of peoples is made like this, two men in small rooms. Forget the coronations, the conclaves of cardinals, the pomp and processions. This is how the world changes: a counter pushed across a table, a pen stroke that alters the force of a phrase, a woman's sigh as she passes and leaves on the air a trail of orange flower or rose water; her hand pulling close the bed curtain, the discreet sigh of flesh against flesh.”
― Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

“Let's say I will rip your life apart. Me and my banker friends."
How can he explain that to him? The world is not run from where he thinks. Not from border fortresses, not even from Whitehall. The world is run from Antwerp, from Florence, from places he has never imagined; from Lisbon, from where the ships with sails of silk drift west and are burned up in the sun. Not from the castle walls, but from counting houses, not be the call of the bugle, but by the click of the abacus, not by the grate and click of the mechanism of the gun but by the scrape of the pen on the page of the promissory note that pays for the gun and the gunsmith and the powder and shot.”
― Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

“Fortitude. ... It means fixity of purpose. It means endurance. It means having the strength to live with what constrains you.”
― Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

“There's a feeling of power in reserve, a power that drives right through the bone, like the shiver you sense in the shaft of an axe when you take it into your hand. You can strike, or you can not strike, and if you choose to hold back the blow, you can still feel inside you the resonance of the omitted thing.”
― Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

“In England there is no mercy for the poor. You pay for everything, even a broken neck."
472”
― Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

“When have I, when have I ever forced anyone to do anything, he starts to say: but Richard cuts in, "No, you don't, I agree, 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 the street and stamped on."
-Richard (?) nee Cromwell to Thomas Cromwell,358”
― Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

“Bargain all you like. Consign yourself to the hangman if you must. The people don't give a fourpenny fuck."
512”
― Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

“...there is an art to being in a hurry but not showing it."
390”
― Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

“The multitude," Cavendish says, "is always desirous of a change. They never see a great man set up but they must pull him down--for the novelty of the thing.”
― Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

“If a man spoke to you in that tone, you'd invite him to step outside and ask someone to hold your coat."
378”
― Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

“Nothing hurts, or perhaps it’s that everything hurts, because there is no separate pain that he can pick out.”
― Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

“He never lives in a single reality, but in a shifting shadow-mesh of diplomatic possibilities.”
― Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

“When no one else could see, he could see: and that is what it means to be a king.”
― Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

“It is a sure sign of troubled minds, the habit of quotation.”
― Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

“The hunter is among the most innocent of men; living in the moment makes him feel pure. When he returns in the evening, his body aches, his mind is full of pictures of leaves and sky; he does not want to read documents. His miseries, his perplexities have receded, and they will tay away, provided--after food and wine, laughter and exchange of storeis--he gets up at dawn to do it all over again.
But the winter king, less occupied, will begin to think about his conscience.”
― Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

“It is not the stars that make us, Dr. Butts, it is circumstance and necessita, the choices we make under pressure; our virtues make us, but virtues are not enough, we must deploy our vices at times. Or don't you agree?”
― Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

“Wolsey always said that the making of a treaty is the treaty. It doesn't matter what the terms are, just that there are terms. It's the goodwill that matters. When that runs out, the treaty is broken, whatever the terms say. It is the processions that matter, the exchange of gifts, the royal games of bowls, the tilts, jousts and masques; these are not preliminaries to the process, they are the process itself.”
― Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

“His speech is low and rapid, his manner assured; he is at home in courtroom or waterfront, bishop’s palace or inn yard. He can draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house and fix a jury. He will quote you a nice point in the old authors, from Plato to Plautus and back again. He knows new poetry, and can say it in Italian. He works all hours, first up and last to bed. He makes money and he spends it. He will take a bet on anything.”
― Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

“When you are writing laws you are testing words to find their utmost power. Like spells, they have to make things happen in the real world, and like spells, they only work if people believe in them.”
― Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

“When the cardinal came to a closed door he would flatter it--oh beautiful yielding door! Then he would try tricking it open. And you are just the same, just the same." He pours himself some of the duke's present. "But in the last resort, you just kick it in.”
― Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

“Why does everything you know, and everything you’ve learned, confirm you in what you believed before? Whereas in my case, what I grew up with, and what I thought I believed, is chipped away a little and a little, a fragment then a piece and then a piece more. With every month that passes, the corners are knocked off the certainties of this world: and the next world too.”
― Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall