Quotes from book

Wolf Hall

“It is all very well planning what you will do in six months, what you will do in a year, but it’s no good at all if you don’t have a plan for tomorrow.”

“It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.”

“Fortitude…. It means fixity of purpose. It means endurance. It means having the strength to live with what constrains you.”

“Some of these things are true and some of them lies. But they are all good stories.”

“For what's the point of breeding children, if each generation does not improve on what went before.”

“It is almost a joke, but a joke that nobody tells.”

“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.”

“No ruler in the history of the world has ever been able to afford a war. They're not affordable things. No prince ever says, 'This is my budget, so this is the kind of war I can have.”

“Our virtues make us; but virtues are not enough, we must deploy our vices at times.”

“You learn nothing about men by snubbing them and crushing their pride. You must ask them what it is they can do in this world, that they alone can do.”

“Over the city lies the sweet, rotting odor of yesterday's unrecollected sins.”

“At New Year's he had given Anne a present of silver forks with handles of rock crystal. He hopes she will use them to eat with, not to stick in people.”

“Why are we so attached to the severities of the past? Why are we so proud of having endured our fathers and our mothers, the fireless days and the meatless days, the cold winters and the sharp tongues? It's not as if we had a choice.”