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A novel should be a book of questions, not a book of answers. -- Hilary Mantel
Not a word, not a word of love, Prehaps, she thought, he does not love in the ordinary way. God loves us, after all, He manifests it in cancer, cholera, Siamese twins. Not all forms of love are comprehensible, and some forms of love destroy what they touch. -- Hilary Mantel
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
The cardinal used to say, Cromewll will do in a week what will take another man a year, it is not worth your while to block him or oppose him. If you reach out to grip him he will not be there, he will have ridden twenty miles while you are pulling your boots on. -- Hilary Mantel
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
The Robespierre women (as one tended to think of them now) were all on display. Madame looked actively, rather intimidatingly benevolent; it was her aim in life to find a Jacobin who was hungry, then to go into the kitchen and make extravagant efforts, and say, "I have fed a patriot!". -- Hilary Mantel
He makes a gesture, designed to impersonate frankness. -- Hilary Mantel
Some of these things are true and some of them lies. But they are all good stories. -- Hilary Mantel
This is what death does to you, it takes and takes, so that all that is left of your memories is a faint tracing of spilled ash. -- Hilary Mantel
The experienced writer says to the anguished novice: 'Just do it; get something, anything, on to the screen or page, just establish a flow of words, and criticise them later.' You give this advice but can't always take it. -- Hilary Mantel
Already there are too many books in the world. There are more every day. One man cannot hope to read them all. -- Hilary Mantel
You know he will take the credit for your good ideas, and you the blame for his bad ones? When fortune turns against you, you will feel her lash: you always, he never.
One day, when you are still adjusting your harness, you will look up and see him thundering downhill.
pg. 495 -- Hilary Mantel
At the front, people die for their mistakes. Why should politicians be more gently treated? They made the war. They deserve a dozen deaths, each of them. What can we try them for, except for treason, and how can you punish treason, except by death? -- Hilary Mantel
The authorities in Yorkshire have rounded up their rioters, and divided them into those to be charged with affray and manslaughter, and those to be indicted for murder and rape. Rape? Since when do food riots involve rape? But I forget, this is Yorkshire.530 -- Hilary Mantel
In the first play, the crisis is Thomas More. In the second it's Anne Boleyn. In the third book, and the third play, it's crisis every day, an overlapping series of only just negotiable horrors. It's climbing and climbing. Then a sudden abrupt fall - within days. -- Hilary Mantel
But what do they get by the change? One dog sated with meat is replaced by a hungrier dog who bites nearer the bone. Out goes the man grown fat with honor, and in comes a hungry and a lean man. -- Hilary Mantel
Life do your worst; we are plump of knee and mild of eye, we are douce, glib and blithe; we inherit the semi, while others inherit the wind. -- Hilary Mantel
A generation back, his family were called Writh, but they thought an elegant extension would give them consequence;"
Cromwell of Wriothesley -- Hilary Mantel
But I had to think to myself that this was normal, because that was the attitude. I was 19 when I went to see my doctor and I was told it was all in the mind.
[Author Hilary Mantel on being told her endometriosis was imagined pain, From Oct 2009 Daily Mail interview] -- Hilary Mantel
The world beyond the glass is the world of masculine action. Everything she sees is what a man has built. But at each turn-off, each junction, women are waiting to know their fate. -- Hilary Mantel
He is not in the habit of explaining himself. He is not in the habit of discussing his successes. But whenever good fortune has called on him, he has been there, planted on the threshold, ready to fling open the door to her timid scratch on the wood. -- Hilary Mantel
92, '93, '94. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity or Death. -- Hilary Mantel
Camille, a few feet away, looked like a gypsy who had mislaid his violin and had been searching for it in a hedgerow; he frustrated daily the best efforts of an expensive tailor, wearing his clothes as a subtle comment on the collapsing social order. -- Hilary Mantel
When a man admits guilt we have to believe him. We cannot set ourselves to proving to him that he is wrong. Otherwise the law courts would never function. -- Hilary Mantel
But the nation's business must go forward, and this is how: an act to give Wales members of Parliament, and make English the language of the law courts, and to cut from under them the powers of the lords of the Welsh marches. -- Hilary Mantel
He doesn't believe the dead need our prayers, nor can they use them. But anyone who knows the Bible as he does, knows that our God is a capricious God, and there's no harm in hedging your bets. -- Hilary Mantel
Writing comes from that territory of being invalidated. But I had a sense of purpose, too. I wanted to stop apologising for my health, and I thought I might do some good. -- Hilary Mantel
Each action contains its opposite. Each action contains the shadow-trace of the choice not made, the seeds of infinite variation. Each choice, once made, trips contingencies, alternatives; each choice breeds its own universe. -- Hilary Mantel
Some debts should never be tallied, he says. I myself, I know what is owed me, but by God I know what I owe. -- Hilary Mantel
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
God knows," Charpentier said, "I like the present scheme of things very little, but I dread to think what will happen if the conduct of reform falls into hands like yours."
"Reform?" Camille said. "I'm not talking about reform. The city will explode this summer. -- Hilary Mantel
Already d'Anton did not believe this. He recognized it as a disclaimer that Camille would issue from time to time in the hope of disguising the fact that he was an inveterate hell-raiser. -- Hilary Mantel
There are codes so subtle that they change their whole meaning in half a line, or in a syllable, or in a pause, a caesura. -- Hilary Mantel
In this new hall the factions regroup in their old places. Legendre the butcher bawls out a Brissotin: "I'll slaughter you!" "First," says the deputy, "have a decree passed to say that I am an ox. -- Hilary Mantel
Erasmus says that you should praise a ruler even for qualities he does not have. For the flattery gives him to think. And the qualities he presently lacks, he might go to work on them. -- Hilary Mantel
In his student days he was known for a sharp slanderous tongue, for irreverance to his seniors, for drinking and gaming for high stakes. But who would hold up his head, if people judged us by what we were like at twenty? -- Hilary Mantel
When you are writing laws you are testing words to find their utmost power. Like spells, they have to make things happen in the real world, and like spells, they only work if people believe in them. -- Hilary Mantel
I would have been a disaster as a career politician. I would never have toed a party line. -- Hilary Mantel
At New Year's he had given Anne a present of silver forks with handles of rock crystal. He hopes she will use them to eat with, not to stick in people. -- Hilary Mantel
To his inner ear, the cardinal speaks. He says, I saw you, Crumb, when you were at Elvetham: scratching your balls in the dawn and wondering at the violence of the king's whims. If he wants a new wife, fix him one. I didn't, and I am dead. -- Hilary Mantel
Henry stirs into life. 'Do I retain you for what is easy? Do you think it is for your personal beauty? The charm of your presence? I keep you, Master Cromwell, because you are as cunning as a bag of serpents. But do not be a viper in my bosom. You know my decision. Execute it.'
pg. 585 -- Hilary Mantel
I begin to understand you." She nods. "The blacksmith makes his own tools. -- Hilary Mantel
It's not easy to speak of nonexistence, even if you've already commissioned your tomb. -- Hilary Mantel
Imagination only comes when you privilege the subconscious, when you make delay and procrastination work for you. -- Hilary Mantel
Truth can break the gates down, truth can howl in the street; unless truth is pleasing, personable and easy to like, she is condemned to stay whimpering at the back door. -- Hilary Mantel
This is Maximilien de Robespierre, barrister-at-law: unmarried, personable, a young man with all his life before him. Today against his most deeply held convictions he has followed the course of the law and sentenced a criminal to death. And now he is going to pay for it. -- Hilary Mantel
At some point on your road you have to turn and start walking back towards yourself. Or the past will pursue you, and bite the nape of your neck, leave you bleeding in the ditch. Better to turn and face it with such weapons as you possess. -- Hilary Mantel
The things you think are the disasters in your life are not the disasters really. Almost anything can be turned around: out of every ditch, a path, if you can only see it. -- Hilary Mantel
No ruler in the history of the world has ever been able to afford a war. They're not affordable things. No prince ever says, 'This is my budget, so this is the kind of war I can have. -- Hilary Mantel
[T]here comes a point where the fear is too great and the human spirit just gives up and a child wanders off numb and directionless and ends up following a crowd and watching a killing. -- Hilary Mantel
I once dreamed a whole short story. Wrapped in its peculiar atmosphere, as if draped in clouds, I walked entranced to my desk at about 4 A.M. and typed it on to the screen. -- Hilary Mantel
You can control and censor a child's reading, but you can't control her interpretations; no one can guess how a message that to adults seems banal or ridiculous or outmoded will alter itself and evolve inside the darkness of a child's heart. -- Hilary Mantel
He has always rated Anne highly as a strategist. He has never believed in her as a passionate, spontaneous woman. Everything she does is calculated, like everything he does. -- Hilary Mantel
I'm a very organised and rational and linear thinker, and you have to stop all that to write a novel. -- Hilary Mantel
They say she has all the gentlemen of the king's privy chamber, one after another. She don't like delay so they all stand in a line frigging their members, till she shouts, Next. -- Hilary Mantel
When the cardinal came to a closed door he would flatter it
oh beautiful yielding door! Then he would try tricking it open. And you are just the same, just the same." He pours himself some of the duke's present. "But in the last resort, you just kick it in. -- Hilary Mantel
Would they quarrel so much, if they were indifferent? -- Hilary Mantel
Men like Carew, he knows, tend to blame him, Cromwell, for Anne's rise in the world; he facilitated it, he broke the old marriage and let in the new. He does not expect them to soften to him, to include him in their companionship; he only wants them not to spit in his dinner. -- Hilary Mantel
I have written books and I cannot unwrite them. I cannot unbelieve what i believe. I cannot unlive my life -- Hilary Mantel
There are liasons which would put yours in the shade ... -- Hilary Mantel
Hindsight is the historian's necessary vice. -- Hilary Mantel
So many years of preparation, for what was called adult life: was it for this? -- Hilary Mantel
For I chase but one hind, he says, one strange deer timid and wild, and she leads me off the paths that other men have trod, and by myself into the depths of the wood. -- Hilary Mantel
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
Laclos thought, how about a one-way ticket to Pennsylvania? You'd enjoy life among the Quakers. Alternatively, how about a nice dip in the Seine? -- Hilary Mantel
You can be merry with the king, you can share a joke with him. But as Thomas More used to say, it's like sporting with a tamed lion. You tousle its mane and pull its ears, but all the time you're thinking, those claws, those claws, those claws. -- Hilary Mantel
So now get up.'
Felled, dazed, silent, he has fallen; knocked full length on the cobbles of the yard. His head turns sideways; his eyes are turned toward the gate, as if someone might arrive to help him out. One blow, properly placed, could kill him now. -- Hilary Mantel
When you have committed enough words to paper, you feel you have a spine stiff enough to stand up in the wind. But when you stop writing, you find that's all you are - a spine, a row of rattling vertebrae, dried out like an old quill pen. -- Hilary Mantel
It's the living that turn and chase the dead. The long bones and skulls are tumbled from their shrouds, and words like stones thrust into their rattling mouths: we edit their writings, we rewrite their lives. -- Hilary Mantel
Though I have never thought of myself as a book collector, there are shelves in our house browsed so often, on so many rainy winter nights, that the contents have seeped into me as if by osmosis. -- Hilary Mantel
Since I was a very small child, I've had a kind of reverence for the past, and I felt a very intimate connection with it. -- Hilary Mantel
It is not the stars that make us, Dr. Butts, it is circumstance and necessita, the choices we make under pressure; our virtues make us, but virtues are not enough, we must deploy our vices at times. Or don't you agree? -- Hilary Mantel
Our virtues make us; but virtues are not enough, we must deploy our vices at times. -- Hilary Mantel
'Wolf Hall' attempts to duplicate not the historian's chronology but the way memory works: in leaps, loops, flashes. -- Hilary Mantel
Nothing hurts, or perhaps it's that everything hurts, because there is no separate pain that he can pick out. -- Hilary Mantel
I think if I hadn't become a writer I would just have suppressed that part of my personality. I think I would have put it in a box that I never opened. -- Hilary Mantel
For it is a truth, that fortune is inconstant, fickle and mutable. -- Hilary Mantel
It is a wan morning, low unbroken cloud; the light, filtering sparely through glass, is the color of tarnished pewter. How brightly colored the king is, like the king in a new pack of cards: how small his flat blue eye. There -- Hilary Mantel
Once you're labeled as mentally ill, and that's in your medical notes, then anything you say can be discounted as an artifact of your mental illness. -- Hilary Mantel
History offers us vicarious experience. It allows the youngest student to possess the ground equally with his elders; without a knowledge of history to give him a context for present events, he is at the mercy of every social misdiagnosis handed to him. -- Hilary Mantel
You would save them. If you could."
"No. There are periods in revolution when to live is a crime, and people must know how to yield their heads if they are demanded. Perhaps mine will be. If that time comes, I won't dispute it. -- Hilary Mantel
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. -- Hilary Mantel
They always say, we'll just do another year. It's called the golden handcuffs. -- Hilary Mantel
If Mary's blood is Spanish, at least it is royal. And at least she can walk straight and has control of her bowels. -- Hilary Mantel
I didn't cry much after I was 35, but staggered stony-faced into middle age, a handkerchief still in my bag just in case. -- Hilary Mantel
I believe it's fine to give up books even after a page; there's so much to read in the world that will delight you, so why should you work against the grain? -- Hilary Mantel
And your man?' He hesitates. 'Long dead too?' It is the most delicate way that can be contrived, to ask a man if he has killed someone. -- Hilary Mantel
At first they'd thought the guillotine would be a sweet, clean business, but when you have twenty, perhaps thirty heads to take off in a day, there are problems of scale. -- Hilary Mantel
My father always says, choosing a wife is like putting your hand into a bag full of writhing creatures, with one eel to six snakes. What are the chances you will pull out the eel? -- Hilary Mantel
The trouble with England, he thinks, is that it's so poor in gesture. We shall have to develop a hand signal for 'Back off, our prince is fucking this man's daughter.' He is surprised that the Italians have not done it. Though perhaps they have, and he just never caught on. -- Hilary Mantel
When I was small I dreamed of demons. I thought they were under my bed, but you said, it can't be so, you don't get demons our side of the river, the guards won't let them over London Bridge. -- Hilary Mantel
The reader may ask how to tell fact from fiction. A rough guide: anything that seems particularly unlikely is probably true. -- Hilary Mantel
It is not easy to talk about a condition once dismissed as 'the career women's disease'. But women will continue to suffer until we realise the cost of ignoring it -- Hilary Mantel
So this morning
waking early, brooding on what Liz said last night
he wonders, why should my wife worry about women who have no sons? Possibly it's something women do: spend time imagining what it's like to be each other. -- Hilary Mantel
Much historical fiction that centers on real people has always been deficient in information, lacking in craft and empty in affect. -- Hilary Mantel
Busyness, I feel increasingly, is the writer's curse and downfall. You read too much and write too readily, you become cut off from your inner life, from the flow of your own thoughts, and turned far too much towards the outside world. -- Hilary Mantel
Look at my face: I am not afraid of any man alive. -- Hilary Mantel
Never mind." He thinks, "tomorrow is another battle, tomorrow is another world. -- Hilary Mantel
Ask Robespierre. Ask the man with the conscience which is more important, your friend or your country - ask him how he weighs an individual in the scheme of things. Ask him which comes first, his old pals or his new principles. You ask him, Camille. -- Hilary Mantel
I only became a novelist because I thought I had missed my chance to become a historian. -- Hilary Mantel
When he wakes he has to learn the lack of her all over again -- Hilary Mantel
So much has been said between them that is is needless to add a marginal note. It is not for him now to gloss the text of their dealings, nor append a moral. -- Hilary Mantel
As More says, it hardly makes a man a hero, to agree to stand and burn once he is chained to a stake. I have written books and I cannot unwrite them. I cannot unbelieve what I believe. I cannot unlive my life. pg.404 -- Hilary Mantel
My childhood gave me a very powerful sense of being spooked. I didn't know whether what I was seeing were sensory images of other people's unhappiness. Perhaps that was just the way the world manifested itself to me. -- Hilary Mantel
When Stephen comes into a room, the furnishings shrink from him. Chairs scuttle backwards. Joint-stools flatten themselves like pissing bitches. The woollen Bible figures in the king's tapestries lift their hands to cover their ears. -- Hilary Mantel
What for do we nail down the dead? -- Hilary Mantel
Insights don't usually arrive at my desk, but go into notebooks when I'm on the move. Or half-asleep. -- Hilary Mantel
Vadier (on Danton): "We'll clean up the rest of them, and leave that great stuffed turbot till the end."
Danton (on Vadier): "Vadier? I'll eat his brains and use his skull to shit in. -- Hilary Mantel
The gift blesses the giver. -- Hilary Mantel
He, Cromwell, watches. They are not the same couple from day to day: sometimes doting, sometimes chilly and distanced. The billing and cooing, on the whole, is the more painful to watch.
516 -- Hilary Mantel
Edward Seymour says, 'You should have been a bishop, Cromwell.'
'Edward,' he says, 'I should have been Pope. -- Hilary Mantel
I am no one's agent. I am the agent of the law. All the conspiracies pass through my hands. The Committee, you know, draws its present unity from being conspired against. I do not know what would happen if the policy of believing in conspiracies were changed. -- Hilary Mantel
Because Islam doesn't, he said, his voice toneless, -- Hilary Mantel
When I wrote about the French Revolution, I didn't choose to write about aristocrats; I chose characters who began their lives in provincial obscurity. -- Hilary Mantel
Bargain all you like. Consign yourself to the hangman if you must. The people don't give a fourpenny fuck.
512 -- Hilary Mantel
Arrange your face -- Hilary Mantel
There was a man called Chaumette, scruffy and sharp-featured. He hated the aristocrats and he also hated prostitutes, and the two things used to get quite confused in his mind. -- Hilary Mantel
Fantasy is unconstrained by truth. -- Hilary Mantel
It was only a year before his girls died of the same cause. -- Hilary Mantel
I look like a watermelon with a great slice hacked out. I say to myself, it's just another border post on the frontier between medicine and greengrocery; growths and tumour seem always to be described as "the size of a plum" or "the size of a grapefruit". -- Hilary Mantel
Account books form a narrative as engaging as any tale of sea monsters or cannibals. -- Hilary Mantel
Like every writer, I'm drawn by unlikely juxtapositions, precisely-dated and once-only collisions between people from different worlds. -- Hilary Mantel
He feels an irrational dislike taking root, and he tries to dismiss it, because he prefers his dislikes rational, but after all, these circumstances are extreme ... -- Hilary Mantel
CAMILLE DESMOULINS: For the establishment of liberty and the safety of the nation, one day of anarchy will do more than ten years of National Assemblies. -- Hilary Mantel
Occam's Razor shaves you closer. -- Hilary Mantel
Men, it is supposed want to pass their wisdom to their sons; he would give a great deal to protect his own son from a quartr of what he knows. -- Hilary Mantel
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. -- Hilary Mantel
They tell us that the rules of power and the rules of war are the same, the art is to deceive; and you will deceive, and be deceived in your turn, whether you are an ambassador or a suitor. -- Hilary Mantel
Why are we so attached to the severities of the past? Why are we so proud of having endured our fathers and our mothers, the fireless days and the meatless days, the cold winters and the sharp tongues? It's not as if we had a choice. -- Hilary Mantel
I think the wolves all died when the great forests were cut down. That howling you hear is only the Londoners. -- Hilary Mantel
He feels as if he is floating, and she is weighting him to earth; he would like to put his arms around her and his face in her apron, and rest there listening to her heartbeat. But he doesn't want to mess her up, get blood all down the front of her. -- Hilary Mantel
[H]ope takes you by the throat like a stranger, it makes your heart leap ... -- Hilary Mantel
peroration. He had left his opponents with nothing to say and nowhere to -- Hilary Mantel
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
The world moves on so fast, and we lose all chance of being the women our mothers were; we lose all understanding of what shaped them. -- Hilary Mantel
And indeed, who can doubt that everything would be different and better, if only England were ruled by village idiots and their drunken friends? -- Hilary Mantel
He thinks of making his fortune. We all know that money sticks to yours hands.
No, It passes through them, alas. -- Hilary Mantel
I daresay something will happen, between now and '91, to make your fortunes look up. -- Hilary Mantel
But chivalry's day is over. One day soon moss will grow in the tilt yard. The days of the moneylender have arrived, and the days of the swaggering privateer; banker sits down with banker, and kings are their waiting boys. -- Hilary Mantel
Novels teach you that actions have consequences. They help you grow up. -- Hilary Mantel
In my 20s I was in constant pain from undiagnosed endometriosis. With no prospect of a cure, I decided I needed a career - writing - that could accommodate being ill. -- Hilary Mantel
At least, he thinks, the fellow has the wit to see what this is about: not one year's grudge or two, but a fat extract from the book of grief, kept since the cardinal came down. He says, 'Life pays you out, Norris. Don't you find? -- Hilary Mantel
For one never thinks of you alone, Cremuel, but in company, studying the faces of other people, as if you yourself mean to paint them. You make other men think, not "what does he look like?" but "what do I look like? -- Hilary Mantel
I think it's just people. They always hope there may be something better. -- Hilary Mantel
You have always regarded women as disposable, my lord, and you cannot complain if in the end they think the same of you. -- Hilary Mantel
I once stole a book. It was really just the once, and at the time I called it borrowing. It was 1970, and the book, I could see by its lack of date stamps, had been lying unappreciated on the shelves of my convent school library since its publication in 1945. -- Hilary Mantel
My migraine aura was now so severe that the world on the left had ceased to exist, except as an intermittent yellow flash. -- Hilary Mantel
Some said the world would end in 1533. Last year had its adherents too. Why not this year? There is always somebody ready to claim that these are the end times, and nominate his neighbor as the Antichrist. -- Hilary Mantel
Like many people, I am addicted to the physical act of reading. -- Hilary Mantel
Every time you go to see Hamlet you don't expect it to have a happy ending ... you're still enthralled.
(Interview BBC Radio 4 Today 17 October 2012.) -- Hilary Mantel
The lawyer's world is entire unto itself, the human pared away. -- Hilary Mantel
Writing's like running downhill; can't stop if you want to. -- Hilary Mantel
I dislike pastiche; it attracts attention to the language only. -- Hilary Mantel
Christ died to free us from the burden of our sin, but he never, so far as [Sister Philomena:] could see, lifted a finger to free us from our stupidity -- Hilary Mantel
I felt," he said, "irritated. It seemed a waste, I suppose. To come so far. To cross the sea. To die for ... " He shrugs. "God knows why. -- Hilary Mantel
Statements, indictments, bills are circulated, shuffled between judges, prosecutors, the Attorney General, the Lord Chancellor's office; each step in the process clear, logical, and designed to create corpses by due process of law. -- Hilary Mantel
He would have thought God could make his own decisions, but Weston believes the creator may be pushed and coaxed and maybe bribed a little. -- Hilary Mantel
If he's not watering his ale, he's running illegal beasts on the common, if he's not despoiling the common he's assaulting an officer of the peace, if he's not drunk he's dead drunk, and if he's not dead before his time there's no justice in this world. -- Hilary Mantel
Life being so short, and the possible books to write so many, it's good to function by night as well as by day; but would anybody become a writer if they realised at the outset what the working hours were? -- Hilary Mantel
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
Be reasonable, my lord. Once you.ve done it, you'll want to do it all the time. For about three years. That's the way it goes. And your father has other work in mind for you.
pg.480 -- Hilary Mantel
If your going to be ugly it is well to be whole-hearted about it, put some effort in. Georges turned heads. -- Hilary Mantel
The old always think the world is getting worse; it is for the young, equipped with historical facts, to point out that, compared with 1509, or even 1939, life in 2009 is sweet as honey. -- Hilary Mantel
One of the French lords says, "To lose gracefully is an art that every gentleman cultivates." "I hope to cultivate it too," he says. "If you see an example I might follow, please point it out. -- Hilary Mantel
You ... person," he says; and again, "you nobody from Hell, you whore-spawn, you cluster of evil, you lawyer. -- Hilary Mantel
There is a world beyond this black world. There is a world of the possible. A world where Anne can be queen is a world where Cromwell can be Cromwell. He sees it; then he doesn't. The moment is fleeting. But insight cannot be taken back. You cannot return to the moment you were in before. -- Hilary Mantel
Marlinspike goes down to the kitchen, to grow stout and live out his beastly nature. There is a summer ahead, though he cannot imagine its pleasures; sometimes when he's walking in the garden he sees him, a half-grown cat, lolling watchful in an apple tree, or snoring on a wall in the sun. -- Hilary Mantel
Every monarch needs a blow on the head, from time to time. -- Hilary Mantel
You said,' Camille protested, 'that when you wanted to get on terms with Gabrielle you cultivated her mother. It's true, everybody saw you doing it, boasting in Italian and rolling your eyes and doing your tempestuous southerner impersonation. -- Hilary Mantel
Fabre looked up, his mobile face composed. "Good-bye," he said. "Georges-Jacques
study law. Law is a weapon. -- Hilary Mantel
You can have a silence full of words. A lute retains, in its bowl, the notes it has played. The viol, in its strings, holds a concord. A shriveled petal can hold its scent, a prayer can rattle with curses; an empty house, when the owners have gone out, can still be loud with ghosts. -- Hilary Mantel
In England there is no mercy for the poor. You pay for everything, even a broken neck.
472 -- Hilary Mantel
All colors of people mingle in the souks and squares. But they do not merge. -- Hilary Mantel
History is a set of skills rather than a narrative. -- Hilary Mantel
They claim they're living the vita apostolica; but you didn't find the apostles feeling each other's bollocks. -- Hilary Mantel
Coffee was served: bitter and black, like chances missed. -- Hilary Mantel
Over the city lies the sweet, rotting odor of yesterday's unrecollected sins. -- Hilary Mantel
Sometimes you buy a book, powerfully drawn to it, but then it just sits on the shelf. Maybe you flick through it, the ghost of your original purpose at your elbow, but it's not so much rereading as re-dusting. Then one day you pick it up, take notice of the contents; your inner life realigns. -- Hilary Mantel
My father doesn't have views. He would like to, but he can't take the risk. -- Hilary Mantel
The English will never be forgiven for the talent for destruction they have always displayed when they get off their own island. -- Hilary Mantel
Oh, you are not disappointing," Henry says. "But the moment you are, I will let you know. -- Hilary Mantel
When I was thin, I had no notion of what being fat is like. When I worked in a department store, I had sold clothes to women of most sizes, so I should have known; but perhaps you have to experience the state from the inside, to understand what fat is like. -- Hilary Mantel
Cardinal Campeggio has implored Katherine to bow to the king's will, accept that her marriage is invalid and retire to a convent. Certainly, she says sweetly, she will become a nun: if the king will become a monk. -- Hilary Mantel
And Louis is weak. Let him give an inch, and some Cromwell will appear. -- Hilary Mantel
If you help load a cart you get a ride in it, as often as not. It gives him to think, how bad people are at loading carts. Men trying to walk straight ahead through a narrow gateway with a wide wooden chest. A simple rotation of the object solves a great many problems. -- Hilary Mantel
God knows what risks we take, God knows all that Danton has done. God and Camille. God will keep his mouth shut. -- Hilary Mantel
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
If you come into a room and say, this is what we're not talking about, it follows that you're talking about nothing else. -- Hilary Mantel
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
Writers displace their anxiety on to the tools of the trade. It's better to say that you haven't got the right pencil than to say you can't write, or to blame your computer for losing your chapter than face up to your feeling that it's better lost. -- Hilary Mantel
This visit has compacted the court's quarrels and intrigues, trapped them in the small space within the town's walls. The travelers have become as intimate with each other as cards in a pack: contiguous, but their paper eyes blind. -- Hilary Mantel
But who would hold up his head, if people judged us by what we were like at twenty?
398 -- Hilary Mantel
Come to that, don't pay out good money for horoscopes. If things are going to go badly for you, is that what you need to know as you saddle up? -- Hilary Mantel
Suppose she denied him then but favored him some other time? Women are weak and easily conquered by flattery. Especially when men write verses to them, and there are some who sat that Wyatt writes better verses than me, though I am the King. -- Hilary Mantel
She turns her head away, but through the thin film of her veil he can see her skin glow. Because women will coax: tell me, just tell me something, tell me your thoughts; and this he has done. -- Hilary Mantel
distraught. It seems he claims -- Hilary Mantel
Men say," Liz reaches for her scissors, "'I can't endure it when women cry'
just as people say, 'I can't endure this wet weather.' As if it were nothing to do with the men at all, the crying. Just one of those things that happen. -- Hilary Mantel
God knows our hearts. There is no need for an idle formula or an intermediary. No need for language either: God is beyond translation. -- Hilary Mantel
There is only one penalty for high treason: for a man, to be hanged, cut down alive and eviscerated, or for a woman, to be burned. The king may vary the sentence to decapitation; only poisoners are boiled alive. -- Hilary Mantel
There are some strange cold people in this world. It is priests, I think ... Training themselves out of natural feeling. They mean it for the best, of course. -- Hilary Mantel
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
Gradually, you see, our people are coming into the power they have always thought is their due. -- Hilary Mantel
A lie is no less a lie because it is a thousand years old. Your undivided church has liked nothing better than persecuting its own members, burning them and hacking them apart when they stood by their own conscience, slashing their bellies open and feeding their guts to dogs. -- Hilary Mantel
I think I would have been a reasonably good lawyer. I have a faculty for making sense of mountains of information. -- Hilary Mantel
The word 'however' is like an imp coiled beneath your chair. It induces ink to form words you have not yet seen, and lines to march across the page and overshoot the margin. There are no endings. If you think so you are deceived as to their nature. They are all beginnings. Here is one. -- Hilary Mantel
Call no man happy. Call no man happy until he has gone down to his grave in peace. -- Hilary Mantel
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. -- Hilary Mantel
If you are without impulses, you are, to a degree, without joy ...
469 -- Hilary Mantel
You should not desire, he knows, the death of any human creature. Death is your prince, you are not his patron; when you think he is engaged somewhere, he will batter down your door, walks in and wipes his boots on you. -- Hilary Mantel
Write the book you'd like to read. If you wouldn't read it, why would anybody else? Don't write for a perceived audience or market. It may well have vanished by the time your book's ready. -- Hilary Mantel
A pottery outside Paris was turning out his picture on thick glazed crockery in a strident yellow and blue. This is what happens when you become a public figure; people eat their dinners off you. -- Hilary Mantel
Your love of glory must conquer your will to survive; or why fight at all? Why not be a smith, a brewer, a wool merchant? Why are you in the contest, if not to win, and if not to win, then to die? -- Hilary Mantel
I am usually protective of my work, not showing it to anyone until it has been redrafted and polished. -- Hilary Mantel
Sometimes people ask, 'Does writing make you happy?' But I think that's beside the point. It makes you agitated, and continually in a state where you're off balance. You seldom feel serene or settled. -- Hilary Mantel
Henry glares at him. "I will say this for you. You stick by your man." "I have never had anything from the cardinal other than kindness. Why would I not? -- Hilary Mantel
My first two novels were very black comedies. -- Hilary Mantel
I think, if you're going to kill a man, do it. Don't write him a letter about it. Don't bluster and threaten and put him on his guard. -- Hilary Mantel
My thoughts have been the thing I can rely on. -- Hilary Mantel
Some would think that it ought to come in the course of nature to a woman of thirty-six, a wife and mother. A little calm, a little quiet within - little chance. Even after childbearing, there is blood in your veins, not milk. -- Hilary Mantel
Concentrate your narrative energy on the point of change. This is especially important for historical fiction. When your character is new to a place, or things alter around them, that's the point to step back and fill in the details of their world. -- Hilary Mantel
We shall have to develop a hand signal for "Back off, our prince is fucking this man's daughter." He is surprised the Italians have not done it. -- Hilary Mantel
He would rather know what's outside, see the summer in its sad blowing wreckage, than cower behind the blind and wonder what the damage is. - Thomas Cromwell - Wolf Hall -- Hilary Mantel
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. -- Hilary Mantel
Like a historian, I interpret, select, discard, shape, simplify. Unlike a historian, I make up people's thoughts. -- Hilary Mantel
Henry says. He mimes a javelin throw: though in the restrained way -- Hilary Mantel
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
I am always translating, he thinks: if not language to language, then person to person. -- Hilary Mantel
In his family the dead were much discussed. He absorbed the content of these conversations and transmuted them into what passed for memory. This serves the purpose. The dead don't come back, to quibble or correct. -- Hilary Mantel
I tell you, dear Citizen Camille - it's not the deaths I can't stand. It's the judgements, the judgements in the courtroom. -- Hilary Mantel
Do you know you can learn from pain?' But, he explains, the circumstances must be right. To learn, you must have a future: -- Hilary Mantel
Martyr More,' he says. 'The word is in Rome that he and Fisher are to be made saints. -- Hilary Mantel
You once told me, when you visited my house, how Anne conducts herself with men: she says, "Yes, yes, yes, yes, no."' Wyatt nods; he recognises those words; he looks sorry he spoke them. 'Now you may have to transpose one word of that testimony. Yes, yes, yes, no, yes. -- Hilary Mantel
By the tits of Holy Agnes -- Hilary Mantel
There are some people in this world who like everything squared up and precise, and there are those who will allow some drift at the margins. -- Hilary Mantel
For hundreds of years the monks have held the pen, and what they have written is what we take to be our history, but I do not believe it really is. I believe they have suppressed the history they don't like, and written one that is favourable to Rome.' Henry -- Hilary Mantel
Queen Katherine, whose boys have all died, takes it patiently: that is to say, she suffers. -- Hilary Mantel
As a writer, you owe it to yourself not to get stuck in a rut of looking at the world in a certain way. -- Hilary Mantel
England has enjoyed fifty years of peace. This is the Tudors' covenant; peace is what they offer. -- Hilary Mantel
It follows that if you are not a mother you are not a grandmother. Your life has become unpunctuated, whereas the lives of other women around you have these distinct phases. -- Hilary Mantel
Her hands were large and knuckley and calloused, made to hold a rifle, not a needle. -- Hilary Mantel
This was the usual thing. What I asked for was facts: what I got was a sermon. -- Hilary Mantel
Feminism hasn't failed, it's just never been tried. -- Hilary Mantel
[as a writer] you take up a life in your imagination, in which you can live all the other parts of yourself that you didn't become. And you can live in all the eras; the fact that you happened to be born in a certain place, in a certain dictate - the imagination doesn't accept these limitations. -- Hilary Mantel
It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires. -- Hilary Mantel
But our secrets do not keep us. They worry at us; they wear us away, from the inside out. -- Hilary Mantel
My lord, what do you call a whore when she is a knight's daughter?" "Ah," the cardinal says, entering into the problem. "To her face, 'my lady. -- Hilary Mantel
It's just that you are practiced at persuading, and sometimes it's quite difficult, sir to distinguish being persuaded by you from being knocked down in street and stamped on.
Pg.406 -- Hilary Mantel
The ladies of Italy, seemingly carefree, wore constructions of iron beneath their silks. It took infinite patience, not just in negotiation, to get them of of their clothes. -- Hilary Mantel
May 29, the Central Committee of the Sections goes into "permanent session" - what a fine, crisis-ridden sound it has, that term! -- Hilary Mantel
My first career ambitions involved turning into a boy; I intended to be either a railway guard or a knight errant. -- Hilary Mantel
No son wishes to see his son less powerful than himself. -- Hilary Mantel
He has never told anyone this story. He doesn't mind talking to Richard, to Rafe about his past
within reason
but he doesn't mean to give away pieces of himself. -- Hilary Mantel
An elegant woman, with a refinement that makes mere prettiness seem redundant. -- Hilary Mantel
Fiction isn't made by scraping the bones of topicality for the last shreds and sinews, to be processed into mechanically recovered prose. Like journalism, it deals in ideas as well as facts, but also in metaphors, symbols and myths. -- Hilary Mantel
The novelist has a responsibility to adhere to the facts as closely as possible, and if they are inconvenient, that's where the art comes in. You must work with intractable facts and find the dramatic shape inside them. -- Hilary Mantel
She lives on the fumes of whiskey and the iron in the blood of her prey. -- Hilary Mantel
And so it came to pass, as you would imagine, since only the successful prophets are remembered. -- Hilary Mantel
Hans nods emphatically, lips pressed together, eyes bright and taunting, like a dog who steals a handkerchief so you will chase -- Hilary Mantel
Florence and Milan had given him ideas more flexible than those of people who'd stayed at home. -- Hilary Mantel
For many imaginative writers, working for the press is a fact of their life. But it's best not to like it too much. -- Hilary Mantel
Sometimes I fantasize that all my furniture has been destroyed in a cataclysm, and I have to start again with only the stationery catalogue. My entire house would become an office, which would be an overt recognition of the existing state of affairs. -- Hilary Mantel
What kind of persons writes fiction about the past?"
- "The kind of person for whom one lifetime is not enough."
- Hilary Mantel -- Hilary Mantel
When narratives fracture, when words fail, I take consolation from the part of my life that always works: the stationery order. The mail-order stationery people supply every need from royal blue Quink to a dazzling variety of portable hard drives. -- Hilary Mantel
This relentless bonhomie of yours, I knew it would wear out in the end. It is a coin that has changed hands so often. And now the small silver is worn out and we see the base metal. -- Hilary Mantel
And they say [money's] the root of all evil. Well, Protestants say that. Catholics know better. -- Hilary Mantel
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
I can't divide Camille's loyalties. Who knows? He might make the wrong choice. -- Hilary Mantel
In a generation everything can change. -- Hilary Mantel
Writers do not want to think they are less rational than other people, and at the mercy of compulsions, but in their hearts they know they are like those people who are taken for walks by their dogs, towed through hedges and ditches by an untrained sub-human energy. -- Hilary Mantel
I felt a wish to be fictionalized. -- Hilary Mantel
The king is good to those who think him good. -- Hilary Mantel
Sometimes I'm at stool all night."
507 -- Hilary Mantel
A decade of self-aggrandisement, since his daughter flashed her cunny at the king, has made Boleyn rich and settled and confident. -- Hilary Mantel
History is always changing behind us, and the past changes a little every time we retell it. -- Hilary Mantel
There is a pause, while she turns the great pages of her volume of rage, and puts her finger on just the right word. -- Hilary Mantel
in case the dead ones rolled in late. -- Hilary Mantel
We may be tainted with pragmatism, but it only needs a clash of personalities to remind us of our principles. -- Hilary Mantel
Fortitude ... It means fixity of purpose. It means endurance. It means having the strength to live with what constrains you. -- Hilary Mantel
When I began to read as an adult, I read almost exclusively novelists of a generation back. I did the Russians, then I started getting more up to date. When you become published and become a reviewer, piles of books come along and you are pushed by fashion and what you are commissioned to do. -- Hilary Mantel
He looks down at them and arranges his face. Erasmus says that you must do this each morning before you leave your house: put on a mask, as it were. -- Hilary Mantel
you cannot tell people just part of the tale and then stop, or just tell them the parts you choose. -- Hilary Mantel
If you knew at twenty what you know at thirty-five, what a marvellous life you could have; on the other hand, you might find that you couldn't be bothered to have any life at all. -- Hilary Mantel
Back in my 20s, when I wrote 'A Place of Greater Safety,' the French Revolution novel, I thought, 'I'll always have to write historical novels because I can't do plots.' But in the six years of writing that novel, I actually learned to write, to invent things. -- Hilary Mantel
You think you're writing one historical novel and it turns into three, and I'm quite used to a short story turning into a novel - that's happened through my whole career. -- Hilary Mantel
The Revolution is your bride," he said. "As the Church is the Bride of Christ. -- Hilary Mantel
Masters, it is good pastime to have a wife. When they have listened -- Hilary Mantel
Gambling is not a vice, if you can afford to do it. -- Hilary Mantel
He is tired out from the effort of deciphering the world. Tired from the effort of smiling at the foe. -- Hilary Mantel
In these matters, the cardinal says, there is no measure of time; these spirits slip from our hands and through the ages, serpentine, mutable, sly. -- Hilary Mantel
Which of these Thomases saw the blow coming? There are moments when a memory moves right through you. -- Hilary Mantel
Were you ever at the cathedral in Chartres? You walk the labyrinth," he says, "set into the pavement, and it seems there is no sense in it. But if you follow it faithfully it leads you straight to the center. Straight to where you should be. -- Hilary Mantel
But my sins are my strength, he thinks; the sins I have done, that others have not even found the opportunity of committing. I hug them close; they're mine. -- Hilary Mantel
People said - though this felt like a heresy - that they had seen Camille make Robespierre laugh. -- Hilary Mantel
I've got so many ideas, and sometimes the more exhausted my body gets, the more active my mind gets. -- Hilary Mantel
He is not a man wedded to action, Boleyn, but rather a man who stands by, smirking and stroking his beard; he thinks he looks enigmatic, but instead he looks as if he's pleasuring himself. -- Hilary Mantel
[The princess] looks out and sees the humble musician with his lute. But unless the musician turns out to be a prince in disguise, this story cannot end well. -- Hilary Mantel
Give me a book," she said. "A book of sermons, anything."
"What do you want a book for?"
"I want words. I've got to have more words. I was kept stupid on purpose. -- Hilary Mantel
What really disconcerts commentators, I suspect, is that when they read historical fiction, they feel their own lack of education may be exposed; they panic, because they don't know which bits are true. -- Hilary Mantel
When you write, you are not either sex. But when you're read you are definitely gendered. -- Hilary Mantel
The more history I learnt, the less interested I got in winning arguments and the more interested in establishing the truth. -- Hilary Mantel
Jesus Maria,' the boy says. 'The star that guides us to Bethlehem. I thought it was an engine for torture. -- Hilary Mantel
I'm one of these children who grew up at the knee of my grandmother and her elder sister, listening to very old people talk about their memories. -- Hilary Mantel
Try always, Wolsey says, to find out what people wear under their clothes. -- Hilary Mantel
Have you ever observed that when a man gets a son he takes all the credit, and when he gets a daughter he blames his wife? And if they do not breed at all, we say it is because her womb is barren. We do not say it is because his seed is bad. -- Hilary Mantel
Possibly it's something women do: spend time imagining what it's like to be each other.
One can learn from that, he thinks. -- Hilary Mantel
If you have a good story idea, don't assume it must form a prose narrative. It may work better as a play, a screenplay or a poem. Be flexible. -- Hilary Mantel
The multitude," Cavendish says, "is always desirous of a change. They never see a great man set up but they must pull him down
for the novelty of the thing. -- Hilary Mantel
It is difficult to know how the Tudors actually spoke because we're going back before Shakespeare; much of the drama from that period is courtly, allegorical. -- Hilary Mantel
She was a bossy little woman who approached life with her elbows out. -- Hilary Mantel
Why did you let her take the head off London Bridge?"
Cromwell:"You know me, Stephen. The fluid of benevolence flows through my veins and sometimes overspills. -- Hilary Mantel
He wonders again if the dead need translators; perhaps in a moment, in a simple twist of unbecoming, they know everything they need to know. -- Hilary Mantel
She is very plain. What does Henry see in her?'"
"He thinks she's stupid. He finds it restful. -- Hilary Mantel
He turns to the painting. "I fear Mark was right."
"Who is Mark?"
"A silly little boy who runs after George Boleyn. I once heard him say I looked like a murderer."
Gregory says, "Did you not know? -- Hilary Mantel
It is almost a joke, but a joke that nobody tells. -- Hilary Mantel
Tell me, why do you think I do this?" The king sounds curious. "Out of lust? Is that what you think?"
Kill a cardinal? Divide your country? Split the church? 'Seems extravagant,' Chapuys murmurs. -- Hilary Mantel
I do no damage. This is damage, this."
He picked up a paper from Camille's desk. "I can't read your writing, but I take it the general tenor is that Brissot should go and hang himself. -- Hilary Mantel
Why doesn't Yasmin distinguish ... between private morality and public order? -- Hilary Mantel
Why would I trust a man with my business, if he could not manage his own? -- Hilary Mantel
And the more the king snips and carps, the more do his petitioners seek out the company of Cromwell, so unfailing in his amiable courtesy. At home, Jo comes to him looking perplexed. She -- Hilary Mantel
In truth you cannot separate them, your public being and your private self. -- Hilary Mantel
If life is a chain of gold, sometimes God hangs a charm on it. -- Hilary Mantel
[T]he heart is like any other organ, you can weigh it on a scale. -- Hilary Mantel
he is sui generis, a scholar and a wit. -- Hilary Mantel
He never lives in a single reality, but in a shifting shadow-mesh of diplomatic possibilities. -- Hilary Mantel
There cannot be new things in England. There can be old things freshly presented or new things that pretend to be old. -- Hilary Mantel
We don't have to invite pain in.It's waiting for us:sooner than later -- Hilary Mantel
You learn nothing about men by snubbing them and crushing their pride. You must ask them what it is they can do in this world, that they alone can do. -- Hilary Mantel
Paper reassures me, its touch. It's what you respect. -- Hilary Mantel
He, Cromwell, says to his visitors, just tell them this, and tell them loud: to each monk, one bed: to each bed, one monk. Is that so hard for them? -- Hilary Mantel
For historians, creative writers provide a kind of pornography. They break the rules and admit the thing that is imagined, but is not licensed to be imagined. -- Hilary Mantel
But an experienced reader is also a self-aware and critical reader. I can't remember ever reading a story without judging it. -- Hilary Mantel
I shall be as tender to you as my father was not to me. For what's the point of breeding children, if each generation does not improve on who went before? -- Hilary Mantel
For myself, the only way I know how to make a book is to construct it like a collage: a bit of dialogue here, a scrap of narrative, an isolated description of a common object, an elaborate running metaphor which threads between the sequences and holds different narrative lines together. -- Hilary Mantel
He cannot quite accept that real property cannot be changed into money with the same speed and ease with which he changes a wafer into the body of Christ. -- Hilary Mantel
I said to my mother, Henry VII is interesting. No he's not, my mother said. -- Hilary Mantel
I was just going over London Bridge and I saw someone had attacked the Madonna's statue. Knocked off the baby's head.'
'That was done a while back. It would be that devil Cranmer. You know what he is when he's taken a drink. -- Hilary Mantel
His suppressed grief becomes anger. But what can he do with anger? It must also be suppressed. -- Hilary Mantel
Thomas More syas that the imperial troops, for their enjoyment, are roasting live babies on spits. Oh, he would! says Thomas Cromwell. Listen, soldiers don't do that. They're too busy carrying away everything they can turn into ready money. -- Hilary Mantel
It doesn't matter what the terms are, just that there are terms. It's the goodwill that matters. When that runs out, the treaty is broken, whatever the terms say. -- Hilary Mantel
What fascinates me are the turning points where history could have been different. -- Hilary Mantel
crenellations, the scarlet and the pale, the airy stone and the -- Hilary Mantel
Straight is the line of Duty, Curved is the line of Beauty, Follow the straight line, thou shall see. The curved line ever follow thee. -- Hilary Mantel
The migraine angel leaned hard on my shoulder and belched into my face. -- Hilary Mantel
Our schools kept from us, for as long as they could, the dangerous, disruptive, upsetting knowledge of our own female nature. -- Hilary Mantel
Psychics tap into what is collective: our regret and our sense of time going by; our common repression and anxieties. -- Hilary Mantel
Where is Richard, do you know?"
"Chopping onions on the back step. Oh, you mean Master Richard? Upstairs. Eating. Where's anybody? -- Hilary Mantel
We are not priests. We don't want their sort of confession. We are lawyers. We want the truth little by little and only those parts of it we can use. -- Hilary Mantel
The king's council, and obliged him, Thomas Cromwell, by -- Hilary Mantel
~ You know young Francis Weston? He that waits on the king? His people are giving out that you're a Hebrew... Next time you're at court, take your cock out and put it on the table and see what he says to that.
~ I do that anyway, if the conversation flags. -- Hilary Mantel
If a man spoke to you in that tone, you'd invite him to step outside and ask someone to hold your coat.
378 -- Hilary Mantel
There are plenty of books that tell you how to become a writer, but not one that suggests how, if you want a normal life, you might reverse the process. -- Hilary Mantel
I spend a lot of my time talking to the dead, but since I get paid for it, no one thinks I'm mad. -- Hilary Mantel
Fiction leaves us so much work to do, allows the individual so much input; you have to see, you have to hear, you have to taste the madeleine, and while you are seemingly passive in your chair, you have to travel. -- Hilary Mantel
Oh, by the thrice-beshitten shroud of Lazarus! -- Hilary Mantel
But just as everything was going along politely, quietly and wonderfully - in poured Citizen Danton and his crew. -- Hilary Mantel
There is an art to being in a hurry but not showing it.
390 -- Hilary Mantel
Fear of commitment lies behind the fear of writing. -- Hilary Mantel
Is a woman bound to wifely obedience, when the result will be to turn her out of the estate of wife? -- Hilary Mantel
How many men can say, as I must, 'I am a man whose only friend is the King of England'? I have everything, you would think. And yet take Henry away, and I have nothing. -- Hilary Mantel
Those who are made can be unmade. -- Hilary Mantel
Death is your prince, you are not his patron; when you think he is engaged elsewhere, he will batter down your door, walk in and wipe his boots on you. -- Hilary Mantel
He thinks, I remembered you, Thomas More, but you didn't remember me. You never even saw me coming. -- Hilary Mantel
He says in his defence he never meddled with married women, only with virgins. -- Hilary Mantel
It is better not to try people, not to force them to desperation. Make them prosper; out of superfluidity, they will be generous. Full bellies breed gentle manners. The pinch of famine makes monsters. -- Hilary Mantel
No rational man could worship a God so simply vengeful -- Hilary Mantel
Told me if I did not smell of the fire then I smelled of the frying pan. -- Hilary Mantel
Novelists, it seems to me, are the very last people who should be asked to comment on the news of the day, and sooner or later, when they have been pilloried for their views, most of them recognise this. -- Hilary Mantel
Damn it all, Cromwell, why are you such a ... person? It isn't as if you could afford to be. -- Hilary Mantel
He needs guilty men. So he has found men who are guilty. Though perhaps not guilty as charged. -- Hilary Mantel
You don't get on by being original. You don't get on by being bright. You don't get on by being strong. You get on by being a subtle crook. -- Hilary Mantel
The world corrupts me, I think. Or perhaps it's just the weather. It pulls me down and makes me think like you, that one should shrink inside, down and down to a little point of light, preserving one's solitary soul like a flame under glass -- Hilary Mantel
For what's the point of breeding children, if each generation does not improve on what went before. -- Hilary Mantel
It is all very well planning what you will do in six months, what you will do in a year, but it's no good at all if you don't have a plan for tomorrow. -- Hilary Mantel
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
Memory isn't a theme; it's part of the human condition. -- Hilary Mantel
For a young reader that's an important moment, when you recognize that your self exists in the world and that your self exists in literature. -- Hilary Mantel
It is a sure sign of troubled minds, the habit of quotation. -- Hilary Mantel
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 grey wrinkled vastness, like the residue of a dream -- Hilary Mantel
Do you look like the photograph on your book jackets? Authors, I find, seldom do. -- Hilary Mantel
Innocence is a bleeding wound without a bandage, a wound that opens with every casual knock from casual passers-by. Experience is an armour. -- Hilary Mantel
Nobody knows how long the arrests wil go on and who else will be taken. He feels even he does not know, and he is in charge of it. -- Hilary Mantel
Leases, writes, statutes, all are written to be read and each person reads them by the light of self-interest. -- Hilary Mantel
I think it took me half a page of 'Wolf Hall' to think: 'This is the novel I should have been writing all along.' -- Hilary Mantel
I am very happy in second-hand bookshops; would a gardener not be happy in a garden? -- Hilary Mantel
You're only young once, they say, but doesn't it go on for a long time? More years than you can bear. -- Hilary Mantel
When no one else could see, he could see: and that is what it means to be a king. -- Hilary Mantel
I was always desired. But now i am valued. And that is a different thing, i find. -- Hilary Mantel
By the hairy balls of Jesus -- Hilary Mantel
When you get fat, you get a new personality. You can't help it. Complete strangers ascribe it to you. -- Hilary Mantel
I was bound to step out of line, if only because I did not know where the line was: if only because I did not know anything. -- Hilary Mantel
'Show up at the desk' is one of the first rules of writing, but for 'Wolf Hall' I was about 30 years late. -- Hilary Mantel
Sometimes peace looks like war, you cannot tell them apart. -- Hilary Mantel
A statute is written to entrap meaning, a poem to escape it. -- Hilary Mantel
Anne says, "It is all about me. -- Hilary Mantel