Top 100 Mantel's Quotes
#1. Nothing in the last few years has dazzled me more than Hilary Mantel's 'Wolf Hall,' which blew the top of my head straight off. I've read it three times, and I'm still trying to figure out how she put that magnificent thing together.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#2. A Clock stopped
Not the Mantel's
Geneva's farthest skill
Can't put the puppet bowing
That just now dangled still
Emily Dickinson
#3. 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
#4. I think it's just people. They always hope there may be something better.
Hilary Mantel
#5. 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
#6. They claim they're living the vita apostolica; but you didn't find the apostles feeling each other's bollocks.
Hilary Mantel
#7. 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
#8. Out of Frederic Remington's Sundown Leflare graved on the mantel. Sundown and another mountain man cooked and ate their supper. "Then," says Remington, "they sat down with the greatest philosopher on earth - the fire."
J. Frank Dobie
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. They always say, we'll just do another year. It's called the golden handcuffs.
Hilary Mantel
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. For what's the point of breeding children, if each generation does not improve on what went before.
Hilary Mantel
#19. 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
#20. There's an old rule of theater that goes, 'If there's a gun on the mantel in Act I, it must go off in Act III.' The reverse is also true.
Stephen King
#21. The surprising thing is that so many teenage cancer novels are very good. John Green's 'The Fault in Our Stars,' recently published by Penguin, was voted 'Time Magazine's book of the year in 2012 ahead of Hilary Mantel and Zadie Smith.
Mal Peet
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. It's not easy to speak of nonexistence, even if you've already commissioned your tomb.
Hilary Mantel
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. Where is Richard, do you know?"
"Chopping onions on the back step. Oh, you mean Master Richard? Upstairs. Eating. Where's anybody?
Hilary Mantel
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 'Wolf Hall' attempts to duplicate not the historian's chronology but the way memory works: in leaps, loops, flashes.
Hilary Mantel
#31. In her autobiographical Giving Up the Ghost (2003), Hilary Mantel reveals: I have always been addicted to something or other, usually something there's no support group for. Semicolons, for instance, I can never give up for more than two hundred words at a time.
Lynne Truss
#32. 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
#33. If I could do what Hilary Mantel does, I would probably do that. She is more intelligent and a better researcher and knows more what she's about than I do.
Garth Risk Hallberg
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. The look on Tanner's face is priceless. I want to take a picture of it, frame it, and hang it over my mantel so I can give it the finger every day.
Eve Jagger
#37. 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
#38. And they say [money's] the root of all evil. Well, Protestants say that. Catholics know better.
Hilary Mantel
#39. The king's council, and obliged him, Thomas Cromwell, by
Hilary Mantel
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. I've got a whole mantel just waiting for those awards to come, a whole big mantel. There's just so much available space. I've got the light fixtures hanging from the ceiling, all ready to shine on them. I dust it off every day.
Bryan Cranston
#43. 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
#44. Writing's like running downhill; can't stop if you want to.
Hilary Mantel
#45. Feminism hasn't failed, it's just never been tried.
Hilary Mantel
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. I said to my mother, Henry VII is interesting. No he's not, my mother said.
Hilary Mantel
#49. Like a historian, I interpret, select, discard, shape, simplify. Unlike a historian, I make up people's thoughts.
Hilary Mantel
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. Judges wear legal professionalism and precedent as a mantel that secures legitimacy for their decisions. It's how they distinguish themselves from politicians or administrative agencies, while wielding power that is sometimes much greater than those democratically accountable actors.
Yochai Benkler
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. Memory isn't a theme; it's part of the human condition.
Hilary Mantel
#60. 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
#61. [On deciding not to have children:] Yes, there is a little sadness ... But there's also a little sadness around the fact I may never get to go to the moon. Jeez, you can't do everything in this lifetime.
Henriette Mantel
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. Over the city lies the sweet, rotting odor of yesterday's unrecollected sins.
Hilary Mantel
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. 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
#72. 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
#73. I dislike pastiche; it attracts attention to the language only.
Hilary Mantel
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. Already there are too many books in the world. There are more every day. One man cannot hope to read them all.
Hilary Mantel
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. She is very plain. What does Henry see in her?'"
"He thinks she's stupid. He finds it restful.
Hilary Mantel
#81. 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
#82. We don't have to invite pain in.It's waiting for us:sooner than later
Hilary Mantel
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. Paper reassures me, its touch. It's what you respect.
Hilary Mantel
#91. The lawyer's world is entire unto itself, the human pared away.
Hilary Mantel
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. I can't divide Camille's loyalties. Who knows? He might make the wrong choice.
Hilary Mantel
#96. 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
#97. 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
#99. Nothing hurts, or perhaps it's that everything hurts, because there is no separate pain that he can pick out.
Hilary Mantel
#100. 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
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