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"He saw that it was the gaps that were important, the spaces between the threads which made the pattern, and not the threads themselves."
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Exlpore more Observation quotes
"The bowl is warmer than the soup."
"While humans play God, dogs learn from their masters."
"His was an impenetrable darkness. I looked at him as you peer down at a man who is lying at the bottom of a precipice where the sun never shines."
"No writer has an imaginative power richer than what the streets offer."
"That was the sorrow of it. He saw the light but never expected the darkness."
"Dickens writes that one of his characters, "listened to everything without seeming to, which showed he understood his business."
"Boys are marvellous creatures. Perhaps they will sink below the brutes, perhaps they will attain to a woman's tenderness."
"If you love something so much let it go. If it comes back it was meant to be, if it doesn't it never was."
"In the distance, I can see a storm coming in, the dark clouds and the lightning on the horizon moving towards me. I wait and I wait and I wait for the storm. And then it comes, and the rains wash away the nightmares and the memories. And I'm not afraid."
"New Englanders could be so brusque."
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?"
"This is what death does to you, it takes and takes, so that all that is left of your memories is a faint tracing of spilled ash."
"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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