Bring Up the Bodies

Bring Up the Bodies 

by Hilary Mantel

“The word 'however' is like an imp coiled beneath your chair. It induces ink to form words you have not yet seen, and lines to march across the page and overshoot the margin. There are no endings. If you think so you are deceived as to their nature. They are all beginnings. Here is one.” 

“What is the nature of the border between truth and lies? It is permeable and blurred because it is planted thick with rumour, confabulation, misunderstandings and twisted tales. Truth can break the gates down, truth can howl in the street; unless truth is pleasing, personable and easy to like, she is condemned to stay whimpering at the back door.” 

“Those who are made can be unmade.” 

“He needs guilty men. So he has found men who are guilty. Though perhaps not guilty as charged.” 

“She is very plain. What does Henry see in her?'"

"He thinks she's stupid. He finds it restful.” 

“You can be merry with the king, you can share a joke with him. But as Thomas More used to say, it's like sporting with a tamed lion. You tousle its mane and pull its ears, but all the time you're thinking, those claws, those claws, those claws.” 

“He once thought it himself, that he might die with grief: for his wife, his daughters, his sisters, his father and master the cardinal. But pulse, obdurate, keeps its rhythm. You think you cannot keep breathing, but your ribcage has other ideas, rising and falling, emitting sighs. You must thrive in spite of yourself; and so that you may do it, God takes out your heart of flesh, and gives you a heart of stone.” 

“It is better not to try people, not to force them to desperation. Make them prosper; out of superfluidity, they will be generous. Full bellies breed gentle manners. The pinch of famine makes monsters.” 

“Once he had watched Liz making a silk braid. One end was pinned to the wall and on each finger of her raised hands she was spinning loops of thread, her fingers flying so fast he couldn’t see how it worked. ‘Slow down,’ he said, ‘so I can see how you do it,’ but she’d laughed and said, ‘I can’t slow down, if I stopped to think how I was doing it I couldn’t do it at all.” 

“A statute is written to entrap meaning, a poem to escape it.” 

“Anne's lovers are phantom gentlemen, flitting by night with adulterous intent. They come and go by night, unchallenged. They skim over the river like midges, flicker against the dark, their doublets sewn with diamonds. The moon sees them , peering from her hood of bone, and Thames water reflects them, glimmering like fish, like pearls.” 

“God knows our hearts. There is no need for an idle formula or an intermediary. No need for language either: God is beyond translation.” 

“Account books form a narrative as engaging as any tale of sea monsters or cannibals.” 

“There is a pause, while she turns the great pages of her volume of rage, and puts her finger on just the right word.”

“You know what it's like when a cart overturns in the street? Everybody you meet has witnessed it. They saw a man's leg sliced clean off. They saw a woman gasp her last. They saw the goods looted, thieves stealing from the back-end while the carter was crushed at the front. They heard a man roar out his last confession, while another whispered his last will and testament. And if all the people who say they were there had really been there, then the dregs of London would have drained to the one spot, the gaols emptied of thieves, the beds empty of whores, and all the lawyers standing on the shoulders of the butchers to get a better look.” 

“He doesn't believe the dead need our prayers, nor can they use them. But anyone who knows the Bible as he does, knows that our God is a capricious God, and there's no harm in hedging your bets.” 

“To his inner ear, the cardinal speaks. He says, I saw you, Crumb, when you were at Elvetham: scratching your balls in the dawn and wondering at the violence of the king’s whims. If he wants a new wife, fix him one. I didn’t, and I am dead.” 

“You once told me, when you visited my house, how Anne conducts herself with men: she says, “Yes, yes, yes, yes, no.”’ Wyatt nods; he recognises those words; he looks sorry he spoke them. ‘Now you may have to transpose one word of that testimony. Yes, yes, yes, no, yes.” 

“When Gregory says, ‘Are they guilty?’ he means, ‘Did they do it?’ But when he says, ‘Are they guilty?’ he means, ‘Did the court find them so?’ The lawyer’s world is entire unto itself, the human pared away.”

“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.”