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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.

— Hilary Mantel Wolf Hall (2009)

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More quotes by Hilary Mantel

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

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It is a sure sign of troubled minds, the habit of quotation.

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A lie is no less a lie because it is a thousand years old.

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Lent saps the spirits, as of course it is designed to do.

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Gambling is not a vice, if you can afford to do it.

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Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Hilary Mantel (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.