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"I daresay something will happen, between now and '91, to make your fortunes look up."
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"I'm as lucky as a bed of oysters on cioppino night."
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Personal Development
"Some donkeys have amazing luck."
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Personal Development
"Refrain from asking what going to happen tomorrow, and everyday that fortune grants you, count as gain."
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Personal Development
"Luck is a favorable thing out of an uncertainty. No such thing as luck when everything's certain."
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Personal Development
"Calamities are of two kinds: misfortunes to ourselves, and good fortune to others."
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Personal Development
"Fortune makes a fool of those she favors too much."
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Personal Development
"Your fortune is not something to find but to unfold."
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Personal Development
"Industry is fortune's right hand, and frugality its left."
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Personal Development
"The fortune which nobody sees makes a person happy and unenvied."
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Personal Development
"Religions tend to disappear with man's good fortune."
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Personal Development
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"Fantasy is unconstrained by truth."
Philosophy
"He says in his defence he never meddled with married women, only with virgins."
Ethics
"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."
Influence
"Some of these things are true and some of them lies. But they are all good stories."
Story
"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."
Knowledge
"You know what it's like when a cart overturns in the street? Everybody you meet has witnessed it. They saw a man's leg sliced clean off. They saw a woman gasp her last. They saw the goods looted, thieves stealing from the back-end while the carter was crushed at the front. They heard a man roar out his last confession, while another whispered his last will and testament. And if all the people who say they were there had really been there, then the dregs of London would have drained to the one spot, the gaols emptied of thieves, the beds empty of whores, and all the lawyers standing on the shoulders of the butchers to get a better look."
Observation
"It's not easy to diagnose because depending where the endometrial deposits are, the symptoms can be quite different. It's an unrecognized problem among teenage girls, and it's something that every young woman who has painful menstruation should be aware of ... it's a condition that is curable if it's caught early. If not, if it's allowed to run on, it can cause infertility, and it can really mess up your life.[Author Hilary Mantel on being asked about being a writer with endometriosis, Nov 2012 NPR interview]"
Health
"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."
Defiance
"In the first play, the crisis is Thomas More. In the second it's Anne Boleyn. In the third book, and the third play, it's crisis every day, an overlapping series of only just negotiable horrors. It's climbing and climbing. Then a sudden abrupt fall - within days."
Narrative
"Concentrate on sharpening your memory and peeling your sensibility. Cut every page you write by at least one third. Stop constructing those piffling little similes of yours. Work out what it is you want to say. Then say it in the most direct and vigorous way you can. Eat meat. Drink blook. Give up your social life and don't think you can have friends. Rise in the quiet hours of the night and prick your fingertips and use the blood for ink, that will cure you of persiflage!"
Discipline
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