Hilary Mantel

“But I need a new husband. To stop them calling me names. Can the cardinal get husbands?”

“The cardinal can do anything. What kind of husband would you like?”

She considers. “One who will take care of my children. One who can stand up to my family. One who doesn’t die.”

Beneath every history, another history.

He will remember his first sight of the open sea: a gray wrinkled vastness, like the residue of a dream.

For what’s the point of breeding children, if each generation does not improve on what went before?

The trouble with England, he thinks, is that it’s so poor in gesture. We shall have to develop a hand signal for “Back off, our prince is fucking this man’s daughter.” He is surprised that the Italians have not done it. Though perhaps they have, and he just never caught on.

Katherine finds him too intimate with his co-legate; anyone who has spent much time with Wolsey, she thinks, no longer knows what honesty is.

We don’t have to invite pain in, he thinks. It’s waiting for us: sooner rather than later.

It’s not easy to speak of nonexistence, even if you’ve already commissioned your tomb.

It will be the usual tense gathering, everyone cross and hungry: for even a rich Italian with an ingenious kitchen cannot find a hundred ways with smoked eel or salt cod. The merchants in Lent miss their mutton and malmsey, their nightly grunt in a featherbed with wife or mistress; from now to Good Friday their knives will be out for some cutthroat intelligence, some mean commercial advantage.

Norfolk approaches him. He stands far too close. His eyes are bloodshot. Every sinew is jumping. He says, “Substitute nothing, you misbegotten—” The duke stabs a forefinger into his shoulder. “You…person,” he says; and again, “you nobody from Hell, you whore-spawn, you cluster of evil, you lawyer.”