“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.”
Source: Bring Up the Bodies
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Hilary Mantel 21
British writer 1952Related quotes
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Variant: It's wrong what they say about the past, I've learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out.
Source: The Kite Runner (2003)
“The claw tips are tamed with gold.”
Auro mansueverat ungues.
Source: Thebaid, Book VI, Line 724. Thomas Gray's translation: "And calm'd the terrors of his claws in gold".
Source: The Red Badge of Courage
Source: The Keys to the Kingdom series, Grim Tuesday (2004), p. 300.
The Heaven of Animals (l. 20–22).
The Whole Motion; Collected Poems, 1945-1992 (1992)
