A Place of Greater Safety Quotes

“When it was time to write, and he took his pen in his hand, he never thought of consequences; he thought of style. I wonder why I ever bothered with sex, he thought; there's nothing in this breathing world so gratifying as an artfully placed semicolon.”
― Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety

“The reader may ask how to tell fact from fiction. A rough guide: anything that seems particularly unlikely is probably true.”
― Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety

“The weight of the old world is stifling, and trying to shovel its weight off your life is tiring just to think about. The constant shuttling of opinions is tiring, and the shuffling of papers across desks, the chopping of logic and the trimming of attitudes. There must, somewhere, be a simpler, more violent world.”
― Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety

“[H]ope takes you by the throat like a stranger, it makes your heart leap...”
― Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety

“As Danton sees it, the most bizarre aspect of Camille's character is his desire to scribble over every blank surface; he sees a guileless piece of paper, virgin and harmless, and persecutes it till it is black with words, and then besmirches its sister, and so on, through the quire.”
― Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety

“He saw that it was the gaps that were important, the spaces between the threads which made the pattern, and not the threads themselves.”
― Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety

“The maid found a handkerchief of hers, under the bed in which she had died. A ring that had been missing turned up in his own writing desk. A tradesman arrived with fabric she had ordered three weeks ago. Each day, some further evidence of a task half finished, a scheme incomplete. He found a novel, with her place marked.

And this is it.”
― Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety

“He feared, in his secret heart, that one day in company the baby would sit up and speak; that it would engage his eyes, appraise him, and say, 'You prick.”
― Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety

“Robespierre has never forgiven his friends the injuries he has done them, nor the kindnesses he has received from them, nor the talents some of them possess that he doesn’t.”
― Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety

“This revolution - will it be a living?'
'We must hope so. Look, I have to go, I'm visiting a client. He's going to be hanged tomorrow.'
'Is that usual?'
'Oh, they always hang my clients. Even in property and matrimonial cases.”
― Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety

“92, '93, '94. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity or Death.”
― Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety

“This was an idea peculiar to Camille, Maximilien thought, that the worse things get, the better they get. No one else seems to think this way.”
― Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety

“DANTON: Could you indeed? It's you idealists who make the best tyrants.
ROBESPIERRE: It seems a bit late to be having this conversation. I've had to take up violence now, and so much else. We should have discussed it last year.”
― Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety

“The prose,” Robespierre said. “It’s so clean, no conceits, no show, no wit. He means every word. Formerly, you see, he meant every other word. That was his style.”
― Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety

“Life’s going to change. You thought it already had? Not nearly as much as it’s going to change now.
Everything you disapprove of you’ll call “aristocratic.” This term can be applied to food, to books and plays, to modes of speech, to hairstyles and to such venerable institutions as prostitution and the Roman Catholic Church.
If “Liberty” was the watchword of the first Revolution, “Equality” is that of the second. “Fraternity” is a less assertive quality, and must creep in where it may.”
― Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety

“We may be tainted with pragmatism, but it only needs a clash of personalities to remind us of our principles.”
― Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety

“In Paris the swaying lanterns are lit in the streets; lights shine through water, fuzzy, diffuse. Saint-Just sits by an insufficient fire, in a poor light. He is a Spartan after all, and Spartans don’t need home comforts. He has begun his report, his list of accusations; if Robespierre saw it now, he would tear it up, but in a few days’ time it will be the very thing he needs. Sometimes he stops, half-glances over his shoulder. He feels someone has come into the room behind him; but when he allows himself to look, there is nothing to see. It is my destiny, he feels, forming in the shadows of the room. It is the guardian angel I had, long ago when I was a child. It is Camille Desmoulins, looking over my shoulder, laughing at my grammar. He pauses for a moment. He thinks, there are no living ghosts. He takes hold of himself. Bends his head over his task. His pen scratches. His strange letterforms incise the paper. His handwriting is minute. He gets a lot of words to the page.”
― Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety

“Writing's like running downhill; can't stop if you want to.”
― Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety

“I know she’s rather plain, but every girl has a right to conceal that fact from people who haven’t seen her.”
― Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety

“He looked the Prince up and down, like a hangman taking his measurements. 'Of course there will be a revolution,' he said. 'You are making a nation of Cromwells. But we can go beyond Cromwell, I hope. In fifteen years you tyrants and parasites will be gone. We shall have set up a republic, on the purest Roman model.”
― Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety

“Do you know Camille Desmoulins?” he asked. “Have you seen him? He’s one of these law-school boys. Never used anything more dangerous than a paper knife.” He shook his head wonderingly.
“Where do they come from, these people? They’re virgins. They’ve never been to war. They’ve never been on the hunting
field. They’ve never killed an animal, let alone a man. But they’re such enthusiasts for murder.”
― Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety

“Saint-Just read for the next two hours his report on the plots of the Dantonist faction. He had imagined, when he wrote it, that he had the accused man before him; he had not amended it. If Danton were really before him, this reading would be punctuated by the roars of his supporters from the galleries, by his own self-justificatory roaring; but Saint-Just addressed the air, and there was a silence, which deepened and fed on itself. He read without passion, almost without inflection, his eyes on the papers that he held in his left hand. Occasionally he would raise his right arm, then let it fall limply by his side: this was his only gesture, a staid, mechanical one. Once, towards the end, he raised his young face to his audience and spoke directly to them: “After this,” he promised, “there will be only patriots left.”
― Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety

“God knows what risks we take, God knows all that Danton has done. God and Camille. God will keep his mouth shut.”
― Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety

“The main thing is, the constraints have come off style. What we are saying now is that the Revolution does not proceed in a pitiless, forward direction, its politics and its language becoming ever more gross and simplistic: the Revolution is always flexible, subtle, elegant.”
― Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety

“Talking to Robespierre, one tried to make the right noises; but what is right, these days? Address yourself to the militant, and you find a pacifist giving you a reproachful look. Address yourself to the idealist, and you’ll find that you’ve fallen into the company of a cheerful, breezy professional politician. Address yourself to means, and you’ll be told to think of ends: to ends, and you’ll be told to think of means. Make an assumption, and you will find it overturned; offer yesterday’s conviction, and today you’ll find it shredded. What did Mirabeau complain of? He believes everything he says. Presumably there was some layer of Robespierre, some deep stratum, where all the contradictions were resolved.”
― Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety

“Just think, she said to herself. I could be living on the Right Bank. I could be married to a senior clerk at the Treasury. I could be sitting with my feet up, embroidering a linen handkerchief with a rambling-rose design. Instead I'm on the rue des Cordeliers in pursuit of a baguette, with a three-inch blade for comfort.”
― Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety

“The Revolution has got frozen up. They have frozen it up with their talk of moderation. To stand still in Revolution is to slip backwards.”
― Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety

“Fabre looked up, his mobile face composed. "Good-bye," he said. "Georges-Jacques--study law. Law is a weapon.”
― Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety

“Abroad? Oh no. I went to England in ’91, and you stood in the garden at Fontenay and berated me.” He shook his head. “This is my nation. Here I stay. A man can’t carry his country on the soles of his shoes.”
― Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety

“There is no need for unanimity,” Saint- Just said. “It would have been desirable, but let’s get on. There are only two signatures wanting, I think, besides those who have refused. Citizen Lacoste, you next— then be so good as to put the paper in front of Citizen Robespierre, and move the ink a little nearer.”
― Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety