Rasmus

“The world is not run from where he thinks. Not from his 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 castle walls, but from counting houses, not by 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 & Bring Up The Bodies

“You sound as fierce against sin as Harsnet.’ He grinned. ‘Only sins I don’t feel drawn to myself,’ he said with a flash of his old humour. ‘ ’Tis always easy to condemn those.”
― C.J. Sansom, Revelation

“You can’t go encouraging the Vincent Cunninghams of the world because the truth is boys can fall deeper in love than girls, they’re a lot bigger and heavier and they can fall much further and harder and when they hit the ground of reality there’s just this terrible splosh that some other woman is going to have to come along and try to put back into the bottle.”
― Niall Williams, History of the Rain

“Neither the intelligence nor population of England is represented in Parliament, and a favored class have never yielded power except to revolution or the fear of it.”
― John Sherman, The Sherman Letters: 50 Years of American History