Top 350 Hilary Mantel Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

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

— Hilary Mantel

103. “There’s nothing in this breathing world so gratifying as an artfully placed semicolon.”

— Hilary Mantel

104. “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

105. “It is a sure sign of troubled minds, the habit of quotation.”

— Hilary Mantel

106. “In the year 1257, an elephant died in the Tower menagerie and was buried in a pit near the chapel. But the following year he was dug up and his remains sent to Westminster Abbey. Now, what did they want at Westminster Abbey, with the remains of an elephant? If not to carve a ton of relics out of him, and make his animal bones into the bones of saints?”

— Hilary Mantel

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

— Hilary Mantel

108. “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

109. “I think the wolves all died when the great forests were cut down. That howling you hear is only the Londoners.”

— Hilary Mantel

110. “His suppressed grief becomes anger. But what can he do with anger? It must also be suppressed.”

— Hilary Mantel

111. “But the winter king, less occupied, will begin to think about his conscience. He will begin to think about his pride. He will begin to prepare the prizes for those who can deliver him results.”

— Hilary Mantel

112. “The king has great power, but he has no power to know me, except through what I say and what I do.”

— Hilary Mantel

113. “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

114. “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

115. “Suppose within each book there is another book, and within every letter on every page another volume constantly unfolding; but these volumes take no space on the desk. Suppose knowledge could be reduced to a quintessence, held within a picture, a sign, held within a place which is no place. Suppose the human skull were to become capacious, spaces opening inside it, humming chambers like beehives.”

— Hilary Mantel

116. “But the law is not an instrument to find out truth. It is there to create a fiction that will help us move past atrocious acts and face our future.”

— Hilary Mantel

117. “Much historical fiction that centers on real people has always been deficient in information, lacking in craft and empty in affect.”

— Hilary Mantel

118. “Men will tell you that they are so in love with you that it is making them ill. They will say they have stopped eating and sleeping. They say that they fear unless they can have you they will die. Then, the moment you given, they get up and walk away and lose all interest. The next week they will pass you by as if they don’t know you.”

— Hilary Mantel

119. “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

120. “Call no man happy. Call no man happy until he has gone down to his grave in peace.”

— Hilary Mantel

121. “He never lives in a single reality, but in a shifting shadow-mesh of diplomatic possibilities.”

— Hilary Mantel

122. “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

123. “Movements are restricted. Even a duke must manage with only six men to guard and serve him. Strangers are barred. Delivery men must quit the precincts as soon as they have dropped off their loads, and the royal nursery be scrubbed out twice a day.”

— Hilary Mantel

124. “The king never does an upleasent thing. Lord Cromwell does it for him.”

— Hilary Mantel

125. “I wonder what I’ve married into,” Morgan Williams says. But really, this is just something Morgan says; some men have a habitual sniffle, some women have a headache, and Morgan has this wonder.”

— Hilary Mantel

126. “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

127. “The page of an accounts book is there for your use, like a love poem. It’s not there for you to nod and then dismiss it; it’s there to open your heart to possibility. It’s like the scriptures: it’s there for you to think about, and initiate action. Love your neighbor. Study the market. Increase the spread of benevolence. Bring in better figures next year.”

— Hilary Mantel

128. “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

129. “What I always say is, wars begin in man’s time, but they end in God’s time.”

— Hilary Mantel

130. “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

131. “I am always translating, he thinks: if not language to language, then person to person.”

— Hilary Mantel

132. “The migraine angel leaned hard on my shoulder and belched into my face.”

— Hilary Mantel

133. “Why would I trust a man with my business, if he could not manage his own?”

— Hilary Mantel

134. “Full bellies breed gentle manners. The pinch of famine makes monsters.”

— Hilary Mantel

135. “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

136. “No. I am not sad. I am not allowed to be. I am too useful to be sad.”

— Hilary Mantel

137. “Every journey ends; terminates, at some pier, some mist-shrouded wharf, where torches are waiting.”

— Hilary Mantel

138. “I am very happy in second-hand bookshops; would a gardener not be happy in a garden?”

— Hilary Mantel

139. “And I thought I would win him, I really thought I would, for he was tenacious of the world, tenacious of his person, and had a good deal to live for. In the end he was his own murderer. He wrote and wrote and he talked and talked, then suddenly at a stroke he cancelled himself. If ever a man came close to beheading himself, Thomas More was that man.”

— Hilary Mantel

140. “Fear of commitment lies behind the fear of writing.”

— Hilary Mantel

141. “My conscience holds with the majority, which makes me know it does not speak false. “Against Henry’s kingdom, I have all the kingdoms of Christendom. Against each one of your bishops, I have a hundred saints. Against your one parliament, I have all the general councils of the church, stretching back for a thousand years.”

— Hilary Mantel

142. “We are vain and ambitious all the same, and we never do live quiet, because we rise in the morning and we feel the blood coursing in our veins and we think, by the Holy Trinity, whose head can I stamp on today? What worlds are at hand, for me to conquer? Or at the least we think, if God made me a crewman on his ship of fools, how can I murder the drunken captain, and steer it to port and not be wrecked?”

— Hilary Mantel

143. “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

144. “It’s always the wrong bits of the past people want back.”

— Hilary Mantel

145. “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

146. “Insights don’t usually arrive at my desk, but go into notebooks when I’m on the move. Or half-asleep.”

— Hilary Mantel

147. “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

148. “Coffee was served: bitter and black, like chances missed.”

— Hilary Mantel

149. “His speech is low and rapid, his manner assured; he is at home in courtroom or waterfront, bishop’s palace or inn yard. He can draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house and fix a jury. He will quote you a nice point in the old authors, from Plato to Plautus and back again. He knows new poetry, and can say it in Italian. He works all hours, first up and last to bed. He makes money and he spends it. He will take a bet on anything.”

— Hilary Mantel

150. “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