Bring Up The Bodies - Hillary Mantel

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

"Is not an ambassador supposed to be a cheerful fellow and affable? .... He should be in pleasant in any company, conversable and easy, and he should endear himself to his hosts. So he has chances to visit their homes, sit at their boards, become friendly with their wives and their heirs, and corrupt their household to his service."

"Now the duke is like one of those giant cannon the Turks have. The blast is shocking but it needs three hours' cooling time before it can fire again."

" 'God knows our hearts madam. There is no need for an idle formula, or for an intermediary.' No need for language either, he thinks: God is beyond translation."

"The things you think are the disasters in your life are not the disasters really. Almost anything can be turned around: out of every ditch, a path, if you can only see it."

".... we are not priests. We don't want their sort of confession. We are lawyers. We want the truth little by little and only those parts of it we can use."

"A statute is written to entrap meaning, a poem to escape it. A quill, sharpened, can stir and rustle like the pinions of angels. Angels are messengers. They are creatures with a mind and a will. We do not know for a fact that their plumage is like the plumage of falcons, crows, peacocks. They hardly visit men nowadays."

"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."

India: A Million Mutinies Now - V.S. Naipaul

"It fills me with old nerves to contemplate Indian history, to see (perhaps with a depressive's exaggeration, or a far-away colonial's exaggeration) how close we were to cultural destitution, and to wonder at the many accidents which brought us to the concepts - of law and freedom and wide human association - which give men self-awareness and strength, the accidents which have brought us to the point where we can in a way meet William Howard Russell, even in those 'impressions made on my senses by the externals of things', not with equality - time cannot be bent in that way - but with something like lucidity."

"To awaken to history was to cease to live instinctively. It was to begin to see oneself and one's group the way the outside saw the one; and it was to know a kind of rage. India was now full of this rage. There had been a general awakening. But everyone awakened first to his own group or community, every group thought itself unique in its awakening; and every group sought to separate its rage from the rage of other groups."

"Always in India this feeling of a crowd, of vehicles and services stretched to their limit: the trains and the aeroplanes never frequent enough, the roads never wide enough, always needing two or three or four more lanes. The overloaded trucks were often as close together as the wagons of a goods train; and sometimes - it seemed to depend on the mood or local need of drivers - cars and carts came in the wrong direction. Hooters and horns, from scooters and cars and trucks, sounded all the time, seldom angrily. The effect was more that of celebration, as with a wedding procession."
"The idea of an Indian community - in effect, a continental idea of our Indian identity - made sense only when the community was very small, a minority, and isolated."

"Everyone felt that the other man, the other group, was laughing; everyone lived with the feeling of siege."

"To be tormented by a mother-in-law was part of a woman's testing, part, almost, of growing up."

"He said that the love of the communal life stemmed from the life in the joint or extended family: that was full of life, of a constant crowd, and shifting, passionate relationships between the various groups or sections of an extended family."

"What keeps haunting me all the time is the feeling that I am doomed to rise no more than I have risen, Even in this job I have been like a ship's ladder. The sea rises, the ship rises, and the ladder rises with it. But the ladder cannot rise on its own. I cannot be independent of my employer and rise in life."

"To read of events in India before the coming of the British is like reading of many pieces of unfinished business; it is to read of a condition of flux, of things partly done and then partly undone, matters more properly the subject of annals rather than narrative history, which works best when it deals with great things being built up or pulled down."

"Hindu parents were not supposed to question what was being done to their daughters after they had been married. It wasn't that they didn't know; they were not supposed to question. They would, nowadays."

"The poison of the cobra is in his tongue alone. The poison of the brahmin is from head to foot."

"The British had built Calcutta and given it their mark. And - though the circumstances were fortuitous - when the British ceased to rule, the city began to die."

"... he said the way he saw professional qualifications was like this: B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. - Bullshit, More Shit, and Piled High and Deep."

"In India, where most people lived in such poor conditions, the combination of private squalor and an encompassing squalor outside was quite stupefying. It would have given people not only a low idea of their needs - air, water, space for stretching out - but it must also have given people a low idea of their possibilities, as maker or doers."

"In India, the beggars asked for small change. In Pakistan, they asked for a rupee."

Wolf Hall - Hillary Mantel

"He never lives in a single reality, but in a shifting, shadow-mesh of diplomatic possibilities." "One dog sated with meat is replaced by a hungrier dog who bites nearer the bone. Out goes the man grown fat with honour, and in comes a hungry and a lean man."

"Try always, the cardinal says, to learn what people wear under their clothes, for it's not just their skin. Turn the king inside out, and you will find his scaly ancestors: his warm, solid, serpentine flesh."

"My father always says, choosing a wife is like putting your hand into a bag full of writhing creatures, with one eel to six snakes. What are the chances you will pull out the eel?"

"If you are so lenient with yourself as to insist on living with a woman, then for the sake of your soul you should make it a woman you really don't like."

"It is true that the cardinal always says, there are no safe places, there are no sealed rooms, you may as well stand on Cheapside shouting out your sins as confess to a priest anywhere in England. But when I spoke to the cardinal of killing, when I saw a shadow on the wall, there was no one to hear; so if Mark reckons I'm a murderer, that's only because he thinks I look like one."

"There are some strange cold people in this world. It is priests, I think. Saving your presence. Training themselves out of natural feeling."

"The red of a carpet's ground, the flush of the robin's breast or the chaffinch, the red of a wax seal or the heart of the rose: implanted in his landscape, cered in his inner eye, and caught in the glint of a ruby, in the color of blood, the cardinal is alive and speaking. Look at my face: I am not afraid of any man alive."

"Wolsey always said that the making of a treaty is the treaty. It doesn't matter what the terms are, just that there are terms. It's the goodwill that matters. When that runs out, the treaty is broken, whatever the terms say."

"... two monarchs meeting, once they are in sight, should take the same number of steps towards each other. And this works, unless one monarch - helas were to take very small steps, forcing the other to cover the ground."

"As More says, it hardly makes a man a hero, to agree to stand and burn once he is chained to a stake. I have written books and I cannot unwrite them, I cannot unbelieve what I believe. I cannot unlive my life."

"I want him frightened. Fright may unmake a man. I have seen it occur."

"When you are writing laws you are testing words to find their utmost power. Like spells, they have to make things happen in the real world, and like spells, they only work if people believe in them. If your law exacts a penalty, you must be able to enforce it - on the rich as well as the poor, the people on the Scottish borders and the Welsch marches, the men of Cornwall as well as the men of Sussex and Kent."

"The world corrupts me. I think. Or perhaps it's just the weather. It pulls me down and makes me think like you, that one should shrink inside, down and down to a little point of light, preserving one's solitary soul like a flame under a glass. The spectacles of pain and disgrace I see around me, the ignorance, the unthinking vice, the poverty and the lack of hope, and oh, the rain - ...."

"When we meet in heaven, as I hope we will, all our differences will be forgot. Bur for now, we cannot wish them away. Your task is to kill me. Mine is to keep alive. It is my role and my duty. All I own is the ground I stand on, and that ground is Thomas More. If you want it you will have to take it from me. You cannot reasonably believe I will yield it."

"You can have a silence of words. A lute retains, in its bowl, the notes it has played. The viol, in its strings, holds a concord. A shrivelled petal can hold its scent, a prayer can rattle with curses; an empty house, when the owners have gone out, can still be loud with ghosts."