Top 350 Hilary Mantel Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

52. “Truth isn’t pretty, I thought, and the pursuit of it doesn’t make pretty people. Truth isn’t elegant; that’s just mathematicians’ sentimentality. Truth is squalid and full of blots, and you can only find it in the accumulation of dusty and broken facts, in the cellars and sewers of the human mind.”

— Hilary Mantel

53. “What is a woman’s life? Do not think, because she is not a man, she does not fight. The bedchamber is her tilting ground, where she shows her colours, and her theatre of war is the sealed room where she gives birth.”

— Hilary Mantel

54. “Sometimes peace looks like war, you cannot tell them apart.”

— Hilary Mantel

55. “When you’re writing historical fiction, you are always looking for the untold story. You’re looking for what has been repressed politically, or repressed psychologically. You are working in the crypt.”

— Hilary Mantel

56. “God takes out your heart of flesh, and gives you a heart of stone.”

— Hilary Mantel

57. “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

58. “I was the subject of an experiment in love. I lived my life under her gaze, undergoing certain trials for her so that she would not have to undergo them for herself. But, how are our certainties forged, except by the sweat and tears of other people? If your parents don’t teach you how to live; you learn it from books; and clever people watch you learn from your mistakes.”

— Hilary Mantel

59. “As I am a woman, I am the means by which sin enters this world. I am the devil’s gateway, the cursed ingress. I am the means by which Satan attacks the man, whom he was not bold enough to attack, except through me. Well, that is their view of the situation. My view is that there are too many priests with scant learning and smaller occupation. And I wish the Pope and the Emperor and all Spaniards were in the sea and drowned.”

— Hilary Mantel

60. “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

61. “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

62. “The order goes to the Tower, ‘Bring up the bodies.’ Deliver, that is, the accused men, by name Weston, Brereton, Smeaton and Norris, to Westminster Hall for trial. Kingston fetches them by barge; it is 12 May, a Friday.”

— Hilary Mantel

63. “But if you cannot speak truth at a beheading, when can you speak it?”

— Hilary Mantel

64. “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

65. “The story of my own childhood is a complicated sentence that I am always trying to finish, to finish and put behind me. It resists finishing, and partly this is because words are not enough; my early world was synaesthesic, and I am haunted by the ghosts of my own sense impressions, which re-emerge when I try to write, and shiver between the lines.”

— Hilary Mantel

66. “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

67. “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

68. “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

69. “In the end, Dr Bhattacharya had said, the heart fails without warning.”

— Hilary Mantel

70. “Look, he says: once you have exhausted the process of negotiation and compromise, once you have fixed on the destruction of an enemy, that destruction must be swift and it must be perfect. Before you even glance in his direction, you should have his name on a warrant, the ports blocked, his wife and friends bought, his heir under your protection, his money in your strong room and his dog running to your whistle. Before he wakes in the morning, you should have the axe in your hand.”

— Hilary Mantel

71. “By the blood of creeping Christ, stand on your feet.” Creeping Christ? he thinks. What does he mean?”

— Hilary Mantel

72. “He knows different now. It’s the living that 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. Thomas More had spread the rumor that Little Bilney, chained to the stake, had recanted as the fire was set. It wasn’t enough for him to take Bilney’s life away; he had to take his death too.”

— Hilary Mantel

73. “Death stays when the visitors have gone, and the nurses turn a blind eye; he leans back on his portable throne, he crosses his legs, he says, ‘Entertain me.”

— Hilary Mantel

74. “If you marvel at your good fortune, you should marvel in secret: never let people see you.”

— Hilary Mantel

75. “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

76. “Give me time,” she said mockingly. “That’s the anthem of the married man. Give me time while I make my excuses, give me time while I sort out my head. Just another week, just another decade, just till my wife understands. Be reasonable, give me time, just till my children grow up, give me time. And what do you suppose time will give to me?”

— Hilary Mantel

77. “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

78. “Look at my face: I am not afraid of any man alive.”

— Hilary Mantel

79. “By the hairy balls of Jesus.”

— Hilary Mantel

80. “What was England, before Wolsey? A little offshore island, poor and cold.”

— Hilary Mantel

81. “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

82. “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

83. “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

84. “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

85. “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

86. “What do you say to a man who has just killed his wife?”

— Hilary Mantel

87. “No son wishes to see his son less powerful than himself.”

— Hilary Mantel

88. “Memory isn’t a theme; it’s part of the human condition.”

— Hilary Mantel

89. “We don’t have to invite pain in, he thinks. It’s waiting for us: sooner rather than later.”

— Hilary Mantel

90. “Once the queen’s head is severed, he walks away. A sharp pang of appetite reminds him that it is time for a second breakfast, or perhaps an early dinner. The morning’s circumstances are new and there are no rules to guide us. The witnesses, who have knelt for the passing of the soul, stand up and put on their hats. Under the hats, their faces are stunned.”

— Hilary Mantel

91. “My first career ambitions involved turning into a boy; I intended to be either a railway guard or a knight errant.”

— Hilary Mantel

92. “He who climbs higher than he should, falls lower than he would.”

— Hilary Mantel

93. “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

94. “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

95. “Show me where it says, in the Bible, “Purgatory.” Show me where it says “relics, monks, nuns.” Show me where it says “Pope.”

— Hilary Mantel

96. “They always say, we’ll just do another year. It’s called the golden handcuffs.”

— Hilary Mantel

97. “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

98. “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 tat frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.”

— Hilary Mantel

99. “Feminism hasn’t failed, it’s just never been tried.”

— Hilary Mantel

100. “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