A printing press that can write its own books? A mind that thinks about itself? If I don’t have it, at least the King of France doesn’t either.
Show me where it says, in the Bible, “Purgatory.” Show me where it says “relics, monks, nuns.” Show me where it says “Pope.
But what do they get by the change? One dog sated with meat is replaced by a hungrier dog who bites nearer the bone. Out goes the man grown fat with honor, and in comes a hungry and a lean man.
For it is a truth, that fortune is inconstant, fickle and mutable.
Movements are restricted. Even a duke must manage with only six men to guard and serve him. Strangers are barred. Delivery men must quit the precincts as soon as they have dropped off their loads, and the royal nursery be scrubbed out twice a day.
What was England, before Wolsey? A little offshore island, poor and cold.
What do you say to a man who has just killed his wife?
History is not the past – it is the method we have evolved to organize our ignorance of the past. It is the record of what’s left on the record... It is no more ‘the past’ than a birth certificate is a birth, or a script is a performance, or a map is a journey.
In a generation everything can change.
There is a time to be silent. There is a time to talk for your life.
And indeed, who can doubt that everything would be different and better, if only England were ruled by village idiots and their drunken friends?
It is a wan morning, low unbroken cloud; the light, filtering sparely through glass, is the color of tarnished pewter. How brightly colored the king is, like the king in a new pack of cards: how small his flat blue eye. There.
Sometimes it is years before we can see who are the heroes in an affair and who are the victims.
When he was at the Vatican, in Cardinal Bainbridge’s day, he quickly saw that no one in the papal court grasped what was happening, ever; and least of all the Pope. Intrigue feeds on itself; conspiracies have neither mother nor father, and yet they thrive: the only thing to know is that no one knows anything.
Her hands were large and knuckley and calloused, made to hold a rifle, not a needle.
And the more the king snips and carps, the more do his petitioners seek out the company of Cromwell, so unfailing in his amiable courtesy. At home, Jo comes to him looking perplexed. She.
And I thought I would win him, I really thought I would, for he was tenacious of the world, tenacious of his person, and had a good deal to live for. In the end he was his own murderer. He wrote and wrote and he talked and talked, then suddenly at a stroke he cancelled himself. If ever a man came close to beheading himself, Thomas More was that man.
Some debts should never be tallied, he says. “I myself, I know what is owed me, but by God I know what I owe.
Cromwell, suppose you’d been away from England for seven years? If you’d been like a knight in a story, lying under an enchantment? You would look around you and wonder, who are they, these people?
He glances up again, and recognizes Gregory’s design. It is a system of holy simplicity: big papers on the bottom, small ones on top.