Hilary Mantel quotes: top famous quotes and sayings by Hilary Mantel

Top Hilary Mantel Quotes

Browse top 242 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Hilary Mantel.

Favorite Hilary Mantel Quotes

1. "Is a woman bound to wifely obedience, when the result will be to turn her out of the estate of wife?" ~ Hilary Mantel

2. "Those who are made can be unmade." ~ Hilary Mantel

3. "...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

4. "We may be tainted with pragmatism, but it only needs a clash of personalities to remind us of our principles." ~ Hilary Mantel

5. "But do you ask yourself why people want to kill you?' He had laughed. ‘Why, Stephen – much in this life is a mystery but that is no mystery at all. I was always first up in the morning. I was always the last man standing. I was always in the money. I always got the girl. Show me a heap, and I'm on top of it." ~ Hilary Mantel

6. "Right, Thomas Cromwell," she said. "Make a note of this. No strange Dutch drinks. No women. No banned preachers in cellars. I know what you do.""I don't know if I can stay out of cellars.""Here's a bargain. You can take him to a sermon if you don't take him to a brothel." ~ Hilary Mantel

7. "Well, you know the form,' Bedingfield says. ‘She lives in that room and has her ladies – those ones – cook for her over the fire. You knock and go in, and if you call her Lady Katherine she kicks you out, and if you call her Your Highness she lets you stay. So I call her nothing. You, I call her. As if she were a girl that scrubs the steps." ~ Hilary Mantel

8. "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

9. "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

10. "Our virtues make us; but virtues are not enough, we must deploy our vices at times." ~ Hilary Mantel

11. "Sometimes peace looks like war, you cannot tell them apart." ~ Hilary Mantel

12. "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

13. "And beneath Cornwall, beyond and beneath this whole realm of England, beneath the sodden marshes of Wales and the rough territory of the Scots border, there is another landscape; there is a buried empire, where he fears his commissioners cannot reach. Who will swear the hobs and boggarts who live in the hedges and hollow trees, and the wild men who hide in the woods? Who will swear the saints in their niches, and the spirits that cluster at holy wells rustling like fallen leaves, and the miscarried infants dug in to unconsecrated ground: all those unseen dead who hover in winter around forges and village hearths, trying to warm their bare bones? For they too are his countrymen: the generations of uncounted dead, breathing through the living, stealing their light from them, the bloodless ghosts of lord and knave, nun and whore, the ghosts of priest and friar who feed on living England, and suck the substance from the future." ~ Hilary Mantel

14. "Edward Seymour says, ‘You should have been a bishop, Cromwell.'‘Edward,' he says, ‘I should have been Pope." ~ Hilary Mantel

15. "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

16. "But you see, Crumb, it is hard to give up what you have worked at since you were a boy. There were some Italian visitors once, they were cheering us on, Brandon and myself, and they thought that Achilles and Hector had come back to life. So they said.'But which is which? One dragged through the dust by the other ...The king says, 'You turn your boy out beautifully. No nobleman could do more.''I don't want him to be Achilles,' he says, 'I only want him not to be flattened." ~ Hilary Mantel

17. "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

18. "...there is an art to being in a hurry but not showing it."390" ~ Hilary Mantel

19. "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

20. "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

21. "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

22. "Rumours crop in the short summer nights. Dawn finds them like mushroomsin the damp grass. Members of Thomas Cromwell's household have been seeking a midwife in the small hours of the morning. He is hiding a woman at some country house of his, a foreign woman who has given him a daughter.Whatever you do, he says to Rafe, don't defend my honour. I have women like that all over the place.They will believe it, Rafe says. The word in the city is that Thomas Cromwell has a prodigious…Memory, he says. I have a very large ledger. A huge filing system, in which are recorded (under their name, and also under their offence) the details of people who have cut across me." ~ Hilary Mantel

23. "Cravats grow higher, as if they mean to protect the throat. The highest cravats in public life will be worn by Citizen Antoine Saint-Just, of the National Convention and the Committee of Public Safety. In the dark and harrowing days of '94, an obscene feminine inversion will appear: a thin crimson ribbon, worn round a bare white neck." ~ Hilary Mantel

24. "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

25. "He thinks, I remembered you, Thomas More, but you didn't remember me. You never even saw me coming." ~ Hilary Mantel

26. "She is very plain. What does Henry see in her?'""He thinks she's stupid. He finds it restful." ~ Hilary Mantel

27. "As the year goes on, certain deputies—and others, high in public life—will appear unshaven, without coat or cravat; or they will jettison these marks of the polite man, when the temperature rises. They affect the style of men who begin their mornings with a splash under a backyard pump, and who stop off at their street-corner bar for a nip of spirits on their way to ten hours' manual labor. Citizen Robespierre, however, is a breathing rebuketo these men; he retains his buckled shoes, his striped coat of olive green. Can it be the same coat that he wore in the first year of the Revolution? He is not profligate with coats.While Citizen Danton tears off the starched linen that fretted his thick neck, Citizen Saint-Just's cravat grows ever higher, stiffer, more wonderful to behold. He affects a single earring, but he resembles less a corsair than a slightly deranged merchant banker." ~ Hilary Mantel

28. "This may interest you. A letter from my dear cousin Fouquier-Tinville." Camille cast an eye over his relative's best handwriting."Squirm, flattery, abasement, squirm, dearest sweetest Camille, squirm squirm squirm … ‘the election of the Patriot Ministers … I know them all by reputation, but I am not so happy as to be known by them—" ~ Hilary Mantel

29. "But it is no use to justify yourself. It is no good to explain. It is weak to be anecdotal. It is wise to conceal the past even if there is nothing to conceal. A man's power is in the half-light, in the half-seen movements of his hand and the unguessed-at expression of his face. It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires." ~ Hilary Mantel

30. "I dislike pastiche; it attracts attention to the language only." ~ Hilary Mantel

31. "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

32. "By the hairy balls of Jesus" ~ Hilary Mantel

33. "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

34. "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

35. "He thinks, if you were born in Putney, you saw the river every day, and imagined it widening out to the sea. Even if you had never seen the ocean you had a picture of it in your head from what you had been told by foreign people who sometimes came upriver. You knew that one day you would go out into a world of marble pavements and peacocks, of hillsides buzzing with heat, the fragrance of crushed herbs rising around you as you walked. You planned for what your journeys would bring you: the touch of warm terra-cotta, the night sky of another climate, alien flowers, the stone-eyed gaze of other people's saints. But if you were born in Aslockton, in flat fields under a wide sky, you might just be able to imagine Cambridge: no farther." ~ Hilary Mantel

36. "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

37. "This was the usual thing. What I asked for was facts: what I got was a sermon." ~ Hilary Mantel

38. "I have written books and i cannot unwrite them. I cannot unbelieve what i believe. I cannot unlive my life" ~ Hilary Mantel

39. "I was always desired. But now i am valued. And that is a different thing, i find." ~ Hilary Mantel

40. "And if a diversion is needed, why not arrest a general? Arthur Dillon is a friend of eminent deputies, a contender for the post of Commander-in-Chief of the Northern Front; he has proved himself at Valmy and in a halfdozen actions since. In the National Assembly he was a liberal; now he is a republican. Isn't it then logical that he should be thrown into gaol, July 1, on suspicion of passing military secrets to the enemy?" ~ Hilary Mantel

41. "I resent you—" Robespierre said. His words were lost. "The People," he shouted, "are everywhere good, and if they obstruct the Revolution—even, for example, at Toulon—we must blame their leaders.""What are you going on about this for?" Danton asked him. Fabre launched himself from the wall. "He is trying to enunciate a doctrine," he shrieked. "He thinks the time has come for a bloody sermon." "If only," Robespierre yelled, "there were more vertu.""More what?""Vertu. Love of one's country. Self-sacrifice. Civic spirit.""One appreciates your sense of humor, of course." Danton jerked his thumb in the direction of the noise. "The only vertu those bastards understand is the kind I demonstrate every night to my wife." ~ Hilary Mantel

42. "Hérault, Fabre thinks: and his mind drifts back—as it tends to, these days— to the Café du Foy. He'd been giving readings from his latest—Augusta was dying the death at the Italiens—and in came this huge, rough-looking boy, shoe-horned into a lawyer's black suit, whom he'd made a sketch of in the street, ten years before. The boy had developed this upper-class drawl, and he'd talked about Hérault—"his looks are impeccable, he's well traveled, he's pursued by all the ladies at Court"—and beside Danton had been this fey wide-eyed egotist who had turned out to be half the city's extramaritalinterest. The years pass … plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose …" ~ Hilary Mantel

43. "You must, of course. Robespierre doesn't lie or cheat or steal, doesn't get drunk, doesn't fornicate—overmuch. He's not a hedonist or a mainchancer or a breaker of promises." Danton grinned. "But what's the use of all this goodness? People don't try to emulate you. Instead they just pull the wool over your eyes." ~ Hilary Mantel

44. "Gregory picks up his little dog. He hugs her, and nuzzles the fur at the back of her neck. He waits. ‘Rafe and Richard say that when my education is sufficient you mean to marry me to some old dowager with a great settlement and black teeth, and she will wear me out with lechery and rule me with her whims, and she will leave her estate away from the children she has and they will hate me and scheme against my life and one morning I shall be dead in my bed.'The spaniel swivels in his son's arms, turns on him her mild, round, wondering eyes. ‘They are making sport of you, Gregory. If I knew such a woman, I would marry her myself." ~ Hilary Mantel

45. "The maid found a handkerchief of hers, under the bed in which she had died. A ring that had been missing turned up in his own writing desk. A tradesman arrived with fabric she had ordered three weeks ago. Each day, some further evidence of a task half-finished,a scheme incomplete. He found a novel,with her place marked.And this is it." ~ Hilary Mantel

46. "Last night he kept the vigil alone. He lay awake, wishing Liz back; waiting for her to come and lie beside him. It's true he is at Esher with the cardinal, not at home at the Austin Friars. But, he thought, she'll know how to find me. She'll look for the cardinal, drawn through the space between worlds by incense and candlelight. Whereever the cardinal is, I will be." ~ Hilary Mantel

47. "He looks around at his guests. All are prepared. A Latin grace; English would be his choice, but he will suit his company. Who cross themselves ostentatiously, in papist style. Who look at him, expectant. He shouts for the waiters. The doors burst open. Sweating men heave the platters to the table. It seems the meat is fresh, in fact not slaughtered yet. It is just a minor breach of etiquette. The company must sit and salivate. The Boleyns are laid at his hand to be carved." ~ Hilary Mantel

48. "Concentrate on sharpening your memory and peeling your sensibility. Cut every page you write by at least one third. Stop constructing those piffling little similes of yours. Work out what it is you want to say. Then say it in the most direct and vigorous way you can. Eat meat. Drink blook. Give up your social life and don't think you can have friends. Rise in the quiet hours of the night and prick your fingertips and use the blood for ink; that will cure you of persiflage!" ~ Hilary Mantel

49. ". . .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

50. "I went back to the door of Georges's study and pushed it open. He and Camille were sitting at either side of the empty fireplace, not speaking, just staring into each other's faces."Am I interrupting you?""No," Camille said, "we were just staring into each other's faces. I hope you weren't discomfitted by what you heard when you were listening at the door just now?" ~ Hilary Mantel

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We follow our scripts like actors in a very large, very long production. And even with no audience, none of us gives a hint that it isn't real."
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