A Place of Greater Safety
Hilary Mantel
Top 10 Best Quotes
“When it was time to write, and he took his pen in his hand, he never thought of consequences; he thought of style. I wonder why I ever bothered with sex, he thought; there's nothing in this breathing world so gratifying as an artfully placed semicolon.”
“The reader may ask how to tell fact from fiction. A rough guide: anything that seems particularly unlikely is probably true.”
“[H]ope takes you by the throat like a stranger, it makes your heart leap...”
“The weight of the old world is stifling, and trying to shovel its weight off your life is tiring just to think about. The constant shuttling of opinions is tiring, and the shuffling of papers across desks, the chopping of logic and the trimming of attitudes. There must, somewhere, be a simpler, more violent world.”
“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.”
“The maid found a handkerchief of hers, under the bed in which she had died. A ring that had been missing turned up in his own writing desk. A tradesman arrived with fabric she had ordered three weeks ago. Each day, some further evidence of a task half finished, a scheme incomplete. He found a novel, with her place marked. And this is it.”
“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.”
“This revolution - will it be a living?' 'We must hope so. Look, I have to go, I'm visiting a client. He's going to be hanged tomorrow.' 'Is that usual?' 'Oh, they always hang my clients. Even in property and matrimonial cases.”
“He saw that it was the gaps that were important, the spaces between the threads which made the pattern, and not the threads themselves.”
“This was an idea peculiar to Camille, Maximilien thought, that the worse things get, the better they get. No one else seems to think this way.”
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Book Keywords:
lace, historical-fiction, jurnalism, grief, loss, memory, humour, threads
