Margaret George · 939 pages
Rating: (23.8K votes)
“Thus we use our supposed "knowledge" of others to speak on their behalf, and condemn them for their words we ourselves put in their silent mouths.”
― Margaret George, quote from The Autobiography of Henry VIII: With Notes by His Fool, Will Somers
“Yet we always envy others, comparing our shadows to their sunlit sides.”
― Margaret George, quote from The Autobiography of Henry VIII: With Notes by His Fool, Will Somers
“Boredom is that awful state of inaction when the very medicine ― that is, activity ― which could solve it, is seen as odious.
Archery? It is too cold, and besides, the butts need re-covering; the rats have been at the straw.
Music? To hear it is tedious; to compose it, too taxing. And so on.
Of all the afflictions, boredom is ultimately the most unmanning.
Eventually, it transforms you into a great nothing who does nothing ― a cousin to sloth and a brother to melancholy.”
― Margaret George, quote from The Autobiography of Henry VIII: With Notes by His Fool, Will Somers
“To recount these histories is like unravelling a thread: one means only to tell one little part, but then another comes in, and another, for they are all part of the same garment — Tudor, Lancaster, York, Plantagenet.”
― Margaret George, quote from The Autobiography of Henry VIII: With Notes by His Fool, Will Somers
“Then it all came together—every particle of discontent, nostalgia, and resistance in England—fusing in the North. The North: two words to describe a territory and a state of mind. England was conquered and civilized from the South upwards, and as one approached the borders of Scotland—first through Yorkshire and then Durham and finally Northumberland—everything dwindled. The great forests gave way first to stunted trees and then to open, windswept moors; the towns shrank to villages and then to hamlets; cultivated fields were replaced by empty, wild spaces. Here the Cistercian monasteries flourished, they who removed themselves from the centers of civilization and relied on manual labour as a route to holiness. The sheep became scrawnier and their wool thicker, and the men became lawless and more secretive, clannish. Winter lasted eight months and even the summers were grey and raw, leading Northumberland men to claim they had “two winters—a white one and a green one.” Since ancient times these peripheral lands had gone their own way, little connected to anything further south. A few great warrior families—the Percys, the Nevilles, the Stanleys—had claimed overlordship of these dreary, cruel wastes, and through them, the Crown had demanded obeisance. But”
― Margaret George, quote from The Autobiography of Henry VIII: With Notes by His Fool, Will Somers
Margaret George
Born place: in Nashville, Tennessee, The United States
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“That was the best kind of story: when the teller was as much under its spell as the listener.”
― Nancy Farmer, quote from The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm
“Through these days Bunny made increasingly frequent and protracted visits to the bathroom, beating off with a single-minded savagery intense even by Bunny's standards. Now, sitting on the sofa with a large Scotch, his cock feels and looks like something that has been involved in a terrible accident - a cartoon hotdog, maybe, that has made an unsuccessful attempt to cross a busy road.
The boy sits beside him and the two of them are locked in a parenthesis of mutual zonkedness. Bunny Junior stares blankly at the encyclopedia open in his lap. His father watches the television, smokes his fag and drinks his whisky, like an automaton.
After a time, Bunny turns his head and looks at his son and clocks the way he stares at his weird encyclopedia. He sees him but he can't really believe he is there. What does this kid want? What is he supposed to do with him? Who is he? Bunny feels like an extinct volcano, lifeless and paralysed. Yeah, he thinks, I feel like an extinct volcano - with a weird little kid to look after and a mangled sausage for a dick.”
― Nick Cave, quote from The Death of Bunny Munro
“I thought of every strong woman I knew about—my mother, Muriel, my best friends . . . Buffy the Vampire Slayer . . . I would not back down. I would not surrender.”
― Gwen Hayes, quote from Dreaming Awake
“Confined on the ship, from which there is no escape, the madman is delivered to the river with its thousand arms, the sea with its thousand roads, to that great uncertainty external to everything. He is a prisoner in the midst of what is the freest, the openest of routes: bound fast at the infinite crossroads. He is the Passenger par excellence: that is, the prisoner of the passage. And the land he will come to is unknown—as is, once he disembarks, the land from which he comes. He has his truth and his homeland only in that fruitless expanse between two countries that cannot belong to him.”
― Michel Foucault, quote from Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason
“Gabito isn't deceiving anyone," she said with an innocent smile, "but sometimes it happens that even God needs to make weeks that are two years long.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, quote from Living to Tell the Tale
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