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"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..."
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"The distinction between pretending you are better than you are and beginning to be better in reality is finer than moral sleuth hounds conceive."
"And there, right in the middle of it, I find 'Forgive us our sins as we forgive those that sin against us.' There is no slightest suggestion that we are offered forgiveness on any other terms. It is made perfectly clear that if we do not forgive we shall not be forgiven."
"Taste is the only morality. Tell me what you like and I'll tell you what you are."
"Life is indeed terribly complicated-to a man who has lost his principles."
"If there is something to pardon in everything, there is also something to condemn."
"For when once people have begun to believe that prosperity is the reward of virtue, their next calamity is obvious. If prosperity is regarded as the reward of virtue it will be regarded as the symptom of virtue. Men will leave off the heavy task of making good men successful. He will adopt the easier task of making out successful men good."
"Fearlessness is the first requisite of spirituality. Cowards can never be moral."
"If you do not understand the Golden Rule, which is the most important law in the universe, then you are in trouble. All other rules in your holy books combined - are not as valuable as the ONE Golden Rule. Take two minutes to learn the most crucial law in life. Killing another human comes with the highest penalty, regardless of how you justify it. All life is sacred."
Explore more quotes by Hilary Mantel
"Have you ever observed that when a man gets a son he takes all the credit, and when he gets a daughter he blames his wife? And if they do not breed at all, we say it is because her womb is barren. We do not say it is because his seed is bad."
"Some readers read a book as if it were an instruction manual, expecting to understand everything first time, but of course when you write, you put into every sentence an overflow of meaning, and you create in every sentence as many resonances and double meanings and ambiguities as you can possibly pack in there, so that people can read it again and get something new each time."
"As Danton sees it, the most bizarre aspect of Camille's character is his desire to scribble over every blank surface; he sees a guileless piece of paper, virgin and harmless, and persecutes it till it is black with words, and then besmirches its sister, and so on, through the quire."
"Florence and Milan had given him ideas more flexible than those of people who'd stayed at home."
"His suppressed grief becomes anger. But what can he do with anger? It must also be suppressed."
"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."
"History is always changing behind us, and the past changes a little every time we retell it."
"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."
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