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"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."
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"Murphy watched me thoughtfully for several empty seconds. Then she said, very gently, "You're a good man, Harry."I swallowed and bowed my head, made humble by the tone of her voice and the expression on her face, more than the words themselves.Not always rational," she said, smiling. "But you're the best kind of crazy."
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Personal Development
"We refuse to despair of mankind. Without having the unreasonable ambition to save men, we still want to serve them."
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Personal Development
"You can't not help people just because they're stupid or forgetful or unpleasant... If I don't help them, who will?"
Author Name
Personal Development
"Lift up your eyes and see the good in the world, for we are people with an amazing capacity to do great good. And if only the minority choose to exercise this capacity to the smallest degree, oh how wondrous and sweet the deeds performed at but a few hands!"
Author Name
Personal Development
"One religion, one civilisation, above all is Love and Humanity, respectively."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Am I a friend or a prospect? Imagine how much kinder life would be if people put as much effort into befriending others instead of trying to sell them something."
Author Name
Personal Development
"When phobia starts to build up in the psyche of thinking humanity against a part of its own kind, there is nothing more primordial and gruesome than that, especially when we are talking about a species that is supposedly the most intelligent one on Earth. Phobias recorded in DSM do not make a person lesser human, but Islamophobia does indeed define whether a person is really a thinking and sentient sapiens or an ignorant caveman."
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Personal Development
"I love the people,' I said. 'I have room in me for love, and for ever so many little lives."
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Personal Development
"Humanity is a cage, and our puritanical sensibilities comprise the bars. We are confined by our own reason and intellect, and yet most of us don't even know it."
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Personal Development
"But collective thinking is usually short-lived. We're fickle, stupid beings with poor memories and a great gift for self-destruction."
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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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