Top 100 Hilary Mantel Quotes
#1. Already there are too many books in the world. There are more every day. One man cannot hope to read them all.
Hilary Mantel
#3. Masters, it is good pastime to have a wife. When they have listened
Hilary Mantel
#4. 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
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. Jesus Maria,' the boy says. 'The star that guides us to Bethlehem. I thought it was an engine for torture.
Hilary Mantel
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. Do you look like the photograph on your book jackets? Authors, I find, seldom do.
Hilary Mantel
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. Oh, by the thrice-beshitten shroud of Lazarus!
Hilary Mantel
#17. 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
#18. Is a woman bound to wifely obedience, when the result will be to turn her out of the estate of wife?
Hilary Mantel
#19. When he wakes he has to learn the lack of her all over again
Hilary Mantel
#20. No son wishes to see his son less powerful than himself.
Hilary Mantel
#21. Novels teach you that actions have consequences. They help you grow up.
Hilary Mantel
#22. I've got so many ideas, and sometimes the more exhausted my body gets, the more active my mind gets.
Hilary Mantel
#23. 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
#24. Insights don't usually arrive at my desk, but go into notebooks when I'm on the move. Or half-asleep.
Hilary Mantel
#25. 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
#26. 92, '93, '94. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity or Death.
Hilary Mantel
#27. 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
#28. I can't divide Camille's loyalties. Who knows? He might make the wrong choice.
Hilary Mantel
#29. 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
#30. The lawyer's world is entire unto itself, the human pared away.
Hilary Mantel
#31. The reader may ask how to tell fact from fiction. A rough guide: anything that seems particularly unlikely is probably true.
Hilary Mantel
#32. [T]he heart is like any other organ, you can weigh it on a scale.
Hilary Mantel
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. Some of these things are true and some of them lies. But they are all good stories.
Hilary Mantel
#37. 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
#38. If you are without impulses, you are, to a degree, without joy ...
469
Hilary Mantel
#39. 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
#40. We don't have to invite pain in.It's waiting for us:sooner than later
Hilary Mantel
#41. I am very happy in second-hand bookshops; would a gardener not be happy in a garden?
Hilary Mantel
#42. She is very plain. What does Henry see in her?'"
"He thinks she's stupid. He finds it restful.
Hilary Mantel
#43. 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
#44. I was always desired. But now i am valued. And that is a different thing, i find.
Hilary Mantel
#45. Fortitude ... It means fixity of purpose. It means endurance. It means having the strength to live with what constrains you.
Hilary Mantel
#46. I think it's just people. They always hope there may be something better.
Hilary Mantel
#47. It's not easy to speak of nonexistence, even if you've already commissioned your tomb.
Hilary Mantel
#48. 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
#49. A generation back, his family were called Writh, but they thought an elegant extension would give them consequence;"
Cromwell of Wriothesley
Hilary Mantel
#50. I think the wolves all died when the great forests were cut down. That howling you hear is only the Londoners.
Hilary Mantel
#51. They always say, we'll just do another year. It's called the golden handcuffs.
Hilary Mantel
#52. A decade of self-aggrandisement, since his daughter flashed her cunny at the king, has made Boleyn rich and settled and confident.
Hilary Mantel
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#57. A statute is written to entrap meaning, a poem to escape it.
Hilary Mantel
#58. Henry says. He mimes a javelin throw: though in the restrained way
Hilary Mantel
#59. They claim they're living the vita apostolica; but you didn't find the apostles feeling each other's bollocks.
Hilary Mantel
#60. When you write, you are not either sex. But when you're read you are definitely gendered.
Hilary Mantel
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. For it is a truth, that fortune is inconstant, fickle and mutable.
Hilary Mantel
#64. 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
#65. Florence and Milan had given him ideas more flexible than those of people who'd stayed at home.
Hilary Mantel
#66. 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
#67. The English will never be forgiven for the talent for destruction they have always displayed when they get off their own island.
Hilary Mantel
#68. '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
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. Martyr More,' he says. 'The word is in Rome that he and Fisher are to be made saints.
Hilary Mantel
#73. There cannot be new things in England. There can be old things freshly presented or new things that pretend to be old.
Hilary Mantel
#75. Feminism hasn't failed, it's just never been tried.
Hilary Mantel
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. Bargain all you like. Consign yourself to the hangman if you must. The people don't give a fourpenny fuck.
512
Hilary Mantel
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. History is always changing behind us, and the past changes a little every time we retell it.
Hilary Mantel
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. And they say [money's] the root of all evil. Well, Protestants say that. Catholics know better.
Hilary Mantel
#86. My first career ambitions involved turning into a boy; I intended to be either a railway guard or a knight errant.
Hilary Mantel
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. My father doesn't have views. He would like to, but he can't take the risk.
Hilary Mantel
#90. [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
#91. 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
#92. What kind of persons writes fiction about the past?"
- "The kind of person for whom one lifetime is not enough."
- Hilary Mantel
Hilary Mantel
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. 'Wolf Hall' attempts to duplicate not the historian's chronology but the way memory works: in leaps, loops, flashes.
Hilary Mantel
#97. Edward Seymour says, 'You should have been a bishop, Cromwell.'
'Edward,' he says, 'I should have been Pope.
Hilary Mantel
#98. In England there is no mercy for the poor. You pay for everything, even a broken neck.
472
Hilary Mantel
#99. Where is Richard, do you know?"
"Chopping onions on the back step. Oh, you mean Master Richard? Upstairs. Eating. Where's anybody?
Hilary Mantel
#100. 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
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