It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.
Some of these things are true and some of them lies. But they are all good stories.
Give me a book,” she said. “A book of sermons, anything.”“What do you want a book for?”“I want words. I’ve got to have more words. I was kept stupid on purpose.
You know I’m not a man with whom you can have inconsequential conversations. I cannot split myself into two, one your friend and the other the king’s servant.
This revolution – will it be a living?”We must hope so. Look, I have to go, I’m visiting a client. He’s going to be hanged tomorrow.”Is that usual?”Oh, they always hang my clients. Even in property and matrimonial cases.
He feared, in his secret heart, that one day in company the baby would sit up and speak; that it would engage his eyes, appraise him, and say, ‘You prick.
History is not the past – it is the method we have evolved of organising our ignorance of the past
She lives on the fumes of whiskey and the iron in the blood of her prey.
Feminism hasn’t failed, it’s just never been tried.
The world moves on so fast, and we lose all chance of being the women our mothers were; we lose all understanding of what shaped them.
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.
…this is what death does to you, it takes and takes, so that all that is left of your memories is a faint tracing of spilled ash.
His suppressed grief becomes anger. But what can he do with anger? It must also be suppressed.
You learn nothing about men by snubbing them and crushing their pride. You must ask them what it is they can do in this world, that they alone can do.
Men say,” Liz reaches for her scissors, “‘I can’t endure it when women cry’–just as people say, ‘I can’t endure this wet weather.’ As if it were nothing to do with the men at all, the crying. Just one of those things that happen.
He saw that it was the gaps that were important, the spaces between the threads which made the pattern, and not the threads themselves.
This visit has compacted the court’s quarrels and intrigues, trapped them in the small space within the town’s walls. The travelers have become as intimate with each other as cards in a pack: contiguous, but their paper eyes blind.
Florence and Milan had given him ideas more flexible than those of people who’d stayed at home.
He says in his defence he never meddled with married women, only with virgins.
Innocence is a bleeding wound without a bandage, a wound that opens with every casual knock from casual passers-by. Experience is an armour.
For I chase but one hind, he says, one strange deer timid and wild, and she leads me off the paths that other men have trod, and by myself into the depths of the wood.
To his inner ear, the cardinal speaks. He says, I saw you, Crumb, when you were at Elvetham: scratching your balls in the dawn and wondering at the violence of the king’s whims. If he wants a new wife, fix him one. I didn’t, and I am dead.
When Gregory says, ‘Are they guilty?’ he means, ‘Did they do it?’ But when he says, ‘Are they guilty?’ he means, ‘Did the court find them so?’ The lawyer’s world is entire unto itself, the human pared away.
It is not easy to talk about a condition once dismissed as ‘the career women’s disease’. But women will continue to suffer until we realise the cost of ignoring it
The old always think the world is getting worse; it is for the young, equipped with historical facts, to point out that, compared with 1509, or even 1939, life in 2009 is sweet as honey.
Life do your worst; we are plump of knee and mild of eye, we are douce, glib and blithe; we inherit the semi, while others inherit the wind.
When a man admits guilt we have to believe him. We cannot set ourselves to proving to him that he is wrong. Otherwise the law courts would never function.
The lawyer’s world is entire unto itself, the human pared away.
Fabre looked up, his mobile face composed. “Good-bye,” he said. “Georges-Jacques–study law. Law is a weapon.
I daresay something will happen, between now and ’91, to make your fortunes look up.
He has never told anyone this story. He doesn’t mind talking to Richard, to Rafe about his past–within reason–but he doesn’t mean to give away pieces of himself.
The way I tell it, he says to Fitzwilliam, you would think that the blow on the head had improved him. That he actually set out to get it. That every monarch needs a blow on the head, from time to time.
The reader may ask how to tell fact from fiction. A rough guide: anything that seems particularly unlikely is probably true.
Imagination only comes when you privilege the subconscious, when you make delay and procrastination work for you.
Once you’re labeled as mentally ill, and that’s in your medical notes, then anything you say can be discounted as an artifact of your mental illness.
I said to my mother, Henry VII is interesting. No he’s not, my mother said.
Your love of glory must conquer your will to survive; or why fight at all? Why not be a smith, a brewer, a wool merchant? Why are you in the contest, if not to win, and if not to win, then to die?
How many men can say, as I must, ‘I am a man whose only friend is the King of England’? I have everything, you would think. And yet take Henry away, and I have nothing.
… every monarch needs a blow on the head, from time to time.
Every time you go to see Hamlet you don’t expect it to have a happy ending…you’re still enthralled.(Interview BBC Radio 4 Today 17 October 2012.)
If Mary’s blood is Spanish, at least it is royal. And at least she can walk straight and has control of her bowels.
He is not a man wedded to action, Boleyn, but rather a man who stands by, smirking and stroking his beard; he thinks he looks enigmatic, but instead he looks as if he’s pleasuring himself.
As More says, it hardly makes a man a hero, to agree to stand and burn once he is chained to a stake. I have written books and I cannot unwrite them. I cannot unbelieve what I believe. I cannot unlive my life. pg.404
Do you look like the photograph on your book jackets? Authors, I find, seldom do.
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.
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.
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
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.
Is a woman bound to wifely obedience, when the result will be to turn her out of the estate of wife?
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.
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.
Full bellies breed gentle manners. The pinch of famine makes monsters.
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.
History is always changing behind us, and the past changes a little every time we retell it.
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.
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.