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"Do you look like the photograph on your book jackets? Authors, I find, seldom do."
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"The trouble ain't that there is too many fools, but that the lightning ain't distributed right."

"Oh no, real life is escape. The great terrors, the horrors--we hope--of your life come from reading fiction."

"Seeing's believing but feeling's the truth."

"The more you look, the less you see."

"The feeling that the world is full of people who think different is synonymous with wrong."

"What do we any of us have but our illusions? And what do we ask of others but that we be allowed to keep them?"

"Things that try to look like things often do look more like things than things."

"Remarkable, really, the lengths to which humans will go to fit things into their version of reality."

"But even though she was attractive, there was something else about her that caught his eye. She was intelligent, he could sense that right away, and confident, too, as if she were able to move through life on her own terms. To him, these were the things that really mattered. Without them, beauty was nothing."

"Many people, meeting Aziraphale for the first time, formed three impressions: that he was English, that he was intelligent, and that he was gayer than a treeful of monkeys on nitrous oxide."
Explore more quotes by Hilary Mantel

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Your fear is, that if you marry AdA le, you will love her. If you have children, you will love them more than anything else in the world, more than patriotism, more than democracy. If your children grow up, and prove traitors to the people, will you be able to demand their deaths, as the Romans did? Perhaps you will, but perhaps you will not be able to do it. You're afraid that if you love people you may be deflected from your duty, but it's because of another kind of love, isn't it, that the duty is laid upon you?"

"And if a diversion is needed, why not arrest a general? Arthur Dillon is a friend of eminent deputies, a contender for the post of Commander-in-Chief of the Northern Front; he has proved himself at Valmy and in a halfdozen actions since. In the National Assembly he was a liberal; now he is a republican. Isn't it then logical that he should be thrown into gaol, July 1, on suspicion of passing military secrets to the enemy?"

"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."

"Innocence is a bleeding wound without a bandage, a wound that opens with every casual knock from casual passers-by. Experience is an armour."
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