Daniel Wood

“Carew was always a partisan of my wife. I mean, of Katherine. Then of Mary, crying up her rights.’ Henry is thoughtful. ‘Carew’s wife is still a beautiful woman.’ He almost drops his papers. He imagines the words dragged out of him: Majesty, I know you had to do with Eliza Bryan in your young days, but you cannot order a man’s death and then marry his widow. King David sent Uriah into battle to be killed: thereafter, he impregnated Bathsheba, who gave birth to a dying child. He thinks, somebody else will have to tell him. Lord Audley. Fitz. I have had enough of refraining him from what will hurt him, slapping away his hand like a nursemaid.”
― Hilary Mantel, The Mirror & the Light

“Simone de Beauvoir, writing on the same subject, concurred: “To protest in the name of morality against ‘excesses’ or ‘abuses’ is an error which hints at active complicity. There are no ‘abuses’ or ‘excesses’ here, simply an all-pervasive system.”24”
― Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

“In Iowa—in safe, bland Muscatine—Gertrude fell ill, an accident of nature. The disease proved fatal. Holmes told Ned how sorry he was to hear of her passing, but in his eyes there was only a flat blue calm, like the lake on a still August morning.”
― Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City

“In the night I was asleep,’ Christophe says. ‘It was some old ghost, I suppose.’ ‘Surely not,’ Riche says. ‘I never heard of ghosts that walk in June.’ There’s something in that. It was the veiled ladies—living women, as far as one knows—who attended him, till dawn came and they faded into the wall. He remembers the dappling of their garments, the streaks of darkness where they had wiped the queen’s blood on their robes.”
― Hilary Mantel, The Mirror & the Light