Innocence is a bleeding wound without a bandage, a wound that opens with every casual knock from casual passers-by. Experience is an armour.
For hundreds of years the monks have held the pen, and what they have written is what we take to be our history, but I do not believe it really is. I believe they have suppressed the history they don’t like, and written one that is favourable to Rome.’ Henry.
In order not to make a liar out of Henry or Katherine, one or the other, the committee men think up circumstances in which the match may have been partly consummated, or somewhat consummated, and to do this they have to imagine every disaster and shame that can occur between a man and a woman alone in a room in the dark.
He had only thought, and Wolsey had only thought, that the Emperor and Spain would be against it. Only the Emperor. He smiles in the dark, hands behind his head. He doesn’t say which people, but waits for Liz to tell him. ‘All women,’ she says. ‘All women everywhere in England. All women who have a daughter but not a son. All women who have lost a child. All women who have lost any hope of having a child. All women who are forty.
It was not by a serpent, but by paper and ink that evil came into the world.
We don’t have to invite pain in, he thinks. It’s waiting for us: sooner rather than later.
Truth isn’t pretty, I thought, and the pursuit of it doesn’t make pretty people. Truth isn’t elegant; that’s just mathematicians’ sentimentality. Truth is squalid and full of blots, and you can only find it in the accumulation of dusty and broken facts, in the cellars and sewers of the human mind.
If you knew at twenty what you know at thirty-five, what a marvellous life you could have; on the other hand, you might find that you couldn’t be bothered to have any life at all.
It’s always the wrong bits of the past people want back.
But chivalry’s day is over. One day soon moss will grow in the tilt yard. The days of the moneylender have arrived, and the days of the swaggering privateer; banker sits down with banker, and kings are their waiting boys.
Why would I trust a man with my business, if he could not manage his own?
No. I am not sad. I am not allowed to be. I am too useful to be sad.
If you marvel at your good fortune, you should marvel in secret: never let people see you.
He had meant to write to Gregory and say, I have seen such a sweet girl, I will find out who she is and, if I steer our family adroitly in the next few years, perhaps you can marry her. He has not written this. In his present precarious situation, it would be about as useful as the letters Gregory used to write to him: Dear father, I hope you are well. I hope your dog is well. And now no more for lack of time.
Do you know you can learn from pain?’ But, he explains, the circumstances must be right. To learn, you must have a future:.
He cannot lock us all up.” “He has prisons enough.” “For bodies, yes. But what are bodies? He can take our goods, but God will prosper us. He can close the booksellers, but still there will be books. They have their old bones, their glass saints in windows, their candles and shrines, but God has given us the printing press.
Those who think a heart cannot break have led blessed and sheltered lives.
It’s not easy to speak of nonexistence, even if you’ve already commissioned your tomb.
His suppressed grief becomes anger. But what can he do with anger? It must also be suppressed.
My migraine aura was now so severe that the world on the left had ceased to exist, except as an intermittent yellow flash.