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"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."
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"Let those who know know, and let me keep what little privacy I can."

"You don't need a search warrant to go through someone's trash. Seriously. Once it hits the curb it is totally fair game-you an look it up."

"It's quite enough to have a secret. Anything more would be greedy."

"The Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution, intact for over 200 years, guaranteed that the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath of affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. After September 11th, 2001, those were just words on an old piece of paper, no longer a restriction of the Government's overreaching power to shake down its subjects."

"I think the most privacy I had was when the game was going on."
Explore more quotes by Hilary Mantel

"I picked up a snake once. In Italy.""Why did you do that?""For a bet.""Was it poisonous?""We didn't know. That was the point of the bet.""Did it bite you?""Of course.""Why of course?""It wouldn't be much of a story, would it? If I'd put it down unharmed, and away it slid?"

"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."

"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."

"History is not the past it is the method we have evolved of organising our ignorance of the past."

"If you help load a cart you get a ride in it, as often as not. It gives him to think, how bad people are at loading carts. Men trying to walk straight ahead through a narrow gateway with a wide wooden chest. A simple rotation of the object solves a great many problems."

"He runs his eye along the row of knives in their racks, the cleavers for splitting bones. He picks one up, looks at its edge, decides it needs sharpening and says, "Do you think I look like a murderer? In your good opinion?"A silence. After a while, Thurston proffers, "At this moment, master, I would have to say..."

"The story of my own childhood is a complicated sentence that I am always trying to finish, to finish and put behind me. It resists finishing, and partly this is because words are not enough; my early world was synaesthesic, and I am haunted by the ghosts of my own sense impressions, which re-emerge when I try to write, and shiver between the lines."

"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."

"I think now that this is the great division between people. There are people who find life hard and those who find it easy. There are those who have a natural, in-built, expectation of happiness, and there are those who feel that happiness is not to be expected: that it is not, in fact, one of the rights of man. Nor, God knows, one of the rights of women."
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