There’s nothing in this breathing world so gratifying as an artfully placed semicolon.
Queen Katherine, whose boys have all died, takes it patiently: that is to say, she suffers.
I wonder,” he says, “how it can be that, though all these people think they know the king’s pleasure, the king finds himself at every turn impeded.” At every turn, thwarted: maddened and baffled.
She was a bossy little woman who approached life with her elbows out.
If your chance comes to serve, you will have to take him as he is, a pleasure-loving prince. And he will have to take you as you are, which is rather like one of those square-shaped fighting dogs that low men tow about on ropes. Not that you are without a fitful charm, Tom.
I felt a wish to be fictionalized.
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. Though.
The migraine angel leaned hard on my shoulder and belched into my face.
He looks down at them and arranges his face. Erasmus says that you must do this each morning before you leave your house: “put on a mask, as it were.
Brother Luca Pacioli. It took him thirty years to write.” The book is bound in deepest green with a tooled border of gold, and its pages are edged in gilt, so that it blazes in the light. Its clasps are studded with blackish garnets, smooth, translucent. “I hardly dare open it,” the boy says. “Please. You will like it.” It is Summa de Arithmetica. He unclasps it to find a woodcut of the author with a book before him, and a pair of compasses.
But the winter king, less occupied, will begin to think about his conscience. He will begin to think about his pride. He will begin to prepare the prizes for those who can deliver him results.
The page of an accounts book is there for your use, like a love poem. It’s not there for you to nod and then dismiss it; it’s there to open your heart to possibility. It’s like the scriptures: it’s there for you to think about, and initiate action. Love your neighbor. Study the market. Increase the spread of benevolence. Bring in better figures next year.
Henry,” the archbishop says, “I have seen you promote within your own court and council persons whose principles and morals will hardly bear scrutiny. I have seen you deify your own will and appetite, to the sorrow and scandal of Christian people. I have been loyal to you, to the point of violation of my own conscience. I have done much for you, but now I have done the last thing I will ever do.
Fantasy is unconstrained by truth.
What can you do but, as Cicero says, live hopefully, die bravely?
Everybody wants something, if only for the pain to stop.
It is St. Catherine’s Day: in honor of the saint who was threatened with martyrdom on a wheel, we all walk in circles to our destination. At least, that’s the theory. He has never seen anyone over the age of twelve actually doing it.
The cardinal used to say, Cromewll will do in a week what will take another man a year, it is not worth your while to block him or oppose him. If you reach out to grip him he will not be there, he will have ridden twenty miles while you are pulling your boots on.
You have always regarded women as disposable, my lord, and you cannot complain if in the end they think the same of you.
He would have thought God could make his own decisions, but Weston believes the creator may be pushed and coaxed and maybe bribed a little.