A grey wrinkled vastness, like the residue of a dream
You mustn't stand about. Come home with me to dinner.’‘No.’ More shakes his head. ‘I would rather be blown around on the river and go home hungry. If I could trust you only to put food in my mouth – b...
You can have a silence full of words. A lute retains, in its bowl, the notes it has played. The viol, in its strings, holds a concord. A shriveled petal can hold its scent, a prayer can rattle with cu...
Would they quarrel so much, if they were indifferent?
When he wakes he has to learn the lack of her all over again
Todos os rios correm para o mar, e o mar não se enche.
This may interest you. A letter from my dear cousin Fouquier-Tinville. Camille cast an eye over his relative’s best handwriting.Squirm, flattery, abasement, squirm, dearest sweetest Camille, squirm sq...
They tell us that the rules of power and the rules of war are the same, the art is to deceive; and you will deceive, and be deceived in your turn, whether you are an ambassador or a suitor.
The reader may ask how to tell fact from fiction. A rough guide: anything that seems particularly unlikely is probably true.
Statements, indictments, bills are circulated, shuffled between judges, prosecutors, the Attorney General, the Lord Chancellor’s office; each step in the process clear, logical, and designed to create...
Some debts should never be tallied, he says. I myself, I know what is owed me, but by God I know what I owe.
Richard goes with a bob of the head but without another word. It seems he interprets 'don't tell anybody' as 'don't tell anybody but Rafe', because ten minutes later Rafe comes in, and stands looking...
Our schools kept from us, for as long as they could, the dangerous, disruptive, upsetting knowledge of our own female nature.
Not a word, not a word of love, Prehaps, she thought, he does not love in the ordinary way. God loves us, after all, He manifests it in cancer, cholera, Siamese twins. Not all forms of love are compre...
Messengers wait outside the door, to carry urgent orders for release. It is difficult, when the pen skips over a name, to associate it with the corpse it might belong to, tomorrow or the day after tha...
Men like Carew, he knows, tend to blame him, Cromwell, for Anne’s rise in the world; he facilitated it, he broke the old marriage and let in the new. He does not expect them to soften to him, to inclu...
Life’s going to change. You thought it already had? Not nearly as much as it’s going to change now.Everything you disapprove of you’ll call aristocratic. This term can be applied to food, to books and...
Jane says, ‘He asked me if I would be his good mistress.’ They exchange glances. There is a difference between a mistress and a good mistress: does Jane know that? The first implies concubinage. The s...
It is not the stars that make us, Dr. Butts, it is circumstance and , the choices we make under pressure; our virtues make us, but virtues are not enough, we must deploy our vices at times. Or don't y...
I was bound to step out of line, if only because I did not know where the line was: if only because I did not know anything.