The thing people don't understand about an army is its great, unpunctuated wastes of inaction: you have to scavenge for food, you are camped out somewhere with a rising water level because your mad capitaine says so, you are shifted abruptly in the middle of the night into some indefensible position, so you never really sleep, your equipment is defective, the gunners keep causing small unwanted explosions, the crossbowmen are either drunk or praying, the arrows are ordered up but not here yet, and your whole mind is occupied by a seething anxiety that things are going to go badly because il principe, or whatever little worshipfulness is in charge today, is not very good at the basic business of thinking. It didn't take him many winters to get out of fighting and into supply. In Italy, you could always fight in the summer, if you felt like it. If you wanted to go out.

Hilary Mantel

Tags: history war tudors



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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


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Over the city lies the sweet, rotting odor of yesterday's unrecollected sins.

Hilary Mantel

Tags: descriptive



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It is almost a joke, but a joke that nobody tells.

Hilary Mantel


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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 tat frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.

Hilary Mantel


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Arrange your face

Hilary Mantel


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By the tits of Holy Agnes

Hilary Mantel

Tags: saint agnes wolf-hall



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By the hairy balls of Jesus

Hilary Mantel

Tags: jesus wolf-hall



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Those who are made can be unmade.

Hilary Mantel

Tags: life life-lessons made threatening



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When it was time to write, and he took his pen in his hand, he never thought of consequences; he thought of style. I wonder why I ever bothered with sex, he thought; there's nothing in this breathing world so gratifying as an artfully placed semicolon.

Hilary Mantel


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