#figures

Thomas Cromwell is now about fifty years old. He has a labourer's body, stocky, useful, running to fat. He has black hair, greying now, and because of his impermeable skin, which seems designed to resist rain as well as sun, people sneer that his father was an Irishman, though really he was a brewer and a blacksmith at Putney, a shearsman too, a man with a finger in every pie, a scrapper and a brawler, a drunk and a bully, a man often hauled before the justices for punching someone, for cheating someone. How the son of such a man has achieved his present eminence is a question all Europe asks. ↗

— Hilary Mantel

#design

Irony is Fate's most common figure of speech. ↗

— Trevanian

#figures-of-speech #irony #speech

Varese, Apollinaire, Ezra Pound, Leger, Gleizes, Severini, Villon, Duchamp, Duchamp-Villon, Marie Laurencin, Cocteau and many others were to me household names in the literal sense - names of familiar figures around the house. ↗

— Jacques Barzun

#duchamp #familiar #figures #house #household

People are so afraid of authority figures and doctors are authority figures. ↗

— Martha Beck

#afraid #authority #authority figures #doctors #figures

In my generation, history was taught in terms of grand figures, men on whom the destiny of the nation hinged, quintessential heroes. ↗

— Barry Unsworth

#figures #generation #grand #heroes #history

Demonic figures and occult themes have disappeared from modern magic. ↗

— David Copperfield

#disappeared #figures #magic #modern #occult

It would be unthinkable in Canadian public life today for the public inauguration of our supreme political figures to be accompanied by prayer. ↗

— Stockwell Day

#canadian #figures #inauguration #life #our

I was a big Nancy Drew reader. Nancy figures it out. Case closed. ↗

— Sarah Vowell

#case #closed #drew #figures #i

I am writing about people who are alive in the city of New York during mid-20th-century America. And these people are like a character in a play or they are figures in a short story or a novel. ↗

— Gay Talese

#alive #am #america #character #city

There needs to be a planned series of speeches, interviews, etc., over the next two or three months by administration officials and other public figures talking about President Ford, what he is trying to do and what he has accomplished. ↗

— Robert Teeter

#accomplished #administration #etc #figures #ford