Home > Work > The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher
1 " She lives on the fumes of whiskey and the iron in the blood of her prey. "
― Hilary Mantel , The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher
2 " Do you look like the photograph on your book jackets? Authors, I find, seldom do. "
3 " My migraine aura was now so severe that the world on the left had ceased to exist, except as an intermittent yellow flash. "
4 " The migraine angel leaned hard on my shoulder and belched into my face. "
5 " I felt a wish to be fictionalized. "
6 " I remembered the young man with his broad white smile and his ashen hair streaked with gold; the basted perfection of his firm flesh, and the grace of his hand clasping mine. I slotted the notes back inside, slid my purse away, and wondered: which of my defects did he notice first? "
7 " In the end, Dr Bhattacharya had said, the heart fails without warning. "
8 " She held out her hands in a curve around herself, to show how emotion distends you. It makes you feel full up, a big weight in your chest, and then you don't want your dinner. "
9 " Render me the texture of flesh. Pick me what it is, in the timbre of the voice, that marks out the living from the dead. "
10 " Paper reassures me, its touch. It's what you respect. "
11 " A shock will do it, he said, or strong emotion, strong emotion of any sort. It can be horror. Or disgust. But, then again, it doesn’t have to be. Sometimes, he said, people die laughing. "
12 " Call no man happy. Call no man happy until he has gone down to his grave in peace. "
13 " I see that both the living and the dead commute, riding their familiar trains. I am not, as you will have gathered, a person who needs false excitement, or simulated innovation. I am willing, though, to tear up the timetable and take some new routes; and I know I shall find, at some unlikely terminus, a hand that is meant to rest in mine. "
14 " in case the dead ones rolled in late. "
15 " He was, in all, so clean, so sweet, so golden, that I backed off, afraid he must be American and about to convert me to some cult. "