Top 350 Hilary Mantel Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “I think the wolves all died when the great forests were cut down. That howling you hear is only the Londoners.”

— Hilary Mantel

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

— Hilary Mantel

103. “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

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

— Hilary Mantel

105. “Tom Truth says, ‘I do not know if I wrote this verse.’ ‘You have forgot it,’ he says. ‘As would any man of sense. Yet in the fifth stanza you write, Pardon me, your man, Tom Truth. Which you rhyme, unfortunately, with growth.’ Christophe sniggers. ‘Even I know better, and I am French.”

— 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. “Our virtues make us; but virtues are not enough, we must deploy our vices at times.”

— Hilary Mantel

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

— Hilary Mantel

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

— Hilary Mantel

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

— Hilary Mantel

111. “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

112. “Troubled men both, he thinks, Wriothesley and Riche, and alike in some ways, sidling around the peripheries of their own souls, tapping at the walls: oh, what is that hollow sound?”

— Hilary Mantel

113. “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

114. “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

115. “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

116. “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

117. “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

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

— Hilary Mantel

119. “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

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

— Hilary Mantel

121. “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

122. “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

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

— Hilary Mantel

124. “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

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

— Hilary Mantel

126. “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

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

— Hilary Mantel

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

— Hilary Mantel

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

— Hilary Mantel

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

— Hilary Mantel

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

— Hilary Mantel

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

— Hilary Mantel

133. “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

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

— Hilary Mantel

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

— Hilary Mantel

136. “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

137. “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

138. “In truth you cannot separate them, your public being and your private self.”

— Hilary Mantel

139. “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

140. “Whereas we bless an old soldier and give him alms, pitying his blind or limbless state, we do not make heroes of women mangled in the struggle to give birth.”

— Hilary Mantel

141. “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

142. “The ladies of Italy, seemingly carefree, wore constructions of iron beneath their silks. It took infinite patience, not just in negotiation, to get them of of their clothes.”

— Hilary Mantel

143. “As a writer, you owe it to yourself not to get stuck in a rut of looking at the world in a certain way.”

— Hilary Mantel

144. “Writing’s like running downhill; can’t stop if you want to.”

— Hilary Mantel

145. “Then I blame our diet. Englishmen were never made to eat fish. Salt water gets in your brain. A German can live on vegetables, he eats what he calls crowte. A Frenchman eats roots and herbs – if he’s famished you just turn him out to grass. But an Englishman is bred on bacon and beef.”

— Hilary Mantel

146. “Do you know you can learn from pain?’ But, he explains, the circumstances must be right. To learn, you must have a future:.”

— Hilary Mantel

147. “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

148. “To gentle pressure, King Henry capitulated; the White Rose, aged twenty-four, was taken out into God’s light and air, in order to have his head cut off. But there is always another White Rose; the Plantagenets breed, though not unsupervised. There will always.”

— Hilary Mantel

149. “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

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

— Hilary Mantel