Top 350 Hilary Mantel Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “He never lives in a single reality, but in a shifting shadow-mesh of diplomatic possibilities.”

— Hilary Mantel

152. “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

153. “He tries not to give offense. He likes to think of himself by nature as reasonable and conciliatory. He can duck out, prevaricate, evade the issue. He can smile enigmatically and refuse to come down on either side. He can quibble, and stand on semantics. It’s a living, he thinks; but it isn’t. For there comes the bald question, the one choice out of two: do you want a revolution, M. de Robespierre? Yes, damn you, damn all of you, I want it, we need it, that’s what we’re going to have.”

— Hilary Mantel

154. “For I chase but one hind, he says, one strange deer timid and wild, and she leads me off the paths that other men have trod, and by myself into the depths of the wood.”

— Hilary Mantel

155. “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

156. “Look up and see the wind, For we be ready to sail. Noah’s Flood, a miracle play.”

— Hilary Mantel

157. “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

158. “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

159. “Thomas More still has some credit with the king. And he has written him a letter, saying,” he manages to smile, “that I am Wycliffe, Luther and Zwingli rolled together and tied up in string – one reformer stuffed inside another, as for a feast you might parcel a pheasant inside a chicken inside a goose.”

— Hilary Mantel

160. “He is tired out from the effort of deciphering the world. Tired from the effort of smiling at the foe.”

— Hilary Mantel

161. “He did not relish the topic; he sensed in Jane Rochford’s tone the peculiar cruelty of women. They fight with the poor weapons God has bestowed – spite, guile, skill in deceit – and it is likely that in conversations between themselves they trespass in places where a man would never trust his footing.”

— Hilary Mantel

162. “I can’t divide Camille’s loyalties. Who knows? He might make the wrong choice.”

— Hilary Mantel

163. “It is almost a joke, but a joke that nobody tells.”

— Hilary Mantel

164. “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

165. “I dislike pastiche; it attracts attention to the language only.”

— Hilary Mantel

166. “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

167. “Let me unfold to you,” he says, “the way my thoughts proceed.”

— Hilary Mantel

168. “She held out her hands in a curve around herself, to show how emotion distends you. It makes you feel full up, a big weight in your chest, and then you don’t want your dinner.”

— Hilary Mantel

169. “England is always remaking herself, her cliffs eroding, her sandbanks drifting, springs bubbling up in dead ground. They regroup themselves while we sleep, the landscapes through which we move, and even the histories that trail us; the faces of the dead fade into other faces, as a spine of hills into the mist.”

— Hilary Mantel

170. “When narratives fracture, when words fail, I take consolation from the part of my life that always works: the stationery order. The mail-order stationery people supply every need from royal blue Quink to a dazzling variety of portable hard drives.”

— Hilary Mantel

171. “I’m a very organised and rational and linear thinker, and you have to stop all that to write a novel.”

— Hilary Mantel

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

— Hilary Mantel

173. “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

174. “I’ve got so many ideas, and sometimes the more exhausted my body gets, the more active my mind gets.”

— Hilary Mantel

175. “Rouge, also, had a peculiar function as caste-mark. It was applied with a heavy hand and in a circular pattern. It was worn most lavishly on the day of a woman’s debut, when she was obliged to simulate the flush of the contrived orgasm bestowed by royal favour.”

— Hilary Mantel

176. “This is the best he can hope for, unless. There is always unless.”

— Hilary Mantel

177. “But my sins are my strength, he thinks; the sins I have done, that others have not even found the opportunity of committing. I hug them close; they’re mine.”

— Hilary Mantel

178. “Brother Luca Pacioli. It took him thirty years to write.” The book is bound in deepest green with a tooled border of gold, and its pages are edged in gilt, so that it blazes in the light. Its clasps are studded with blackish garnets, smooth, translucent. “I hardly dare open it,” the boy says. “Please. You will like it.” It is Summa de Arithmetica. He unclasps it to find a woodcut of the author with a book before him, and a pair of compasses.”

— Hilary Mantel

179. “Martyr More,’ he says. ‘The word is in Rome that he and Fisher are to be made saints.”

— Hilary Mantel

180. “In Italy you learned cunning, but in Antwerp, flexibility. And besides, the shopping! Just step out of your door and you can get a diamond or a broom, you can get knives, candlesticks and keys, ironwork to suit the expert eye. They make soap and glass, they cure fish and they deal in alum and promissory notes. You can buy pepper and ginger, aniseed and cumin, saffron and rice, almonds and figs; you can buy vats and pots, combs and mirrors, cotton and silk, aloes and myrrh.”

— Hilary Mantel

181. “If your chance comes to serve, you will have to take him as he is, a pleasure-loving prince. And he will have to take you as you are, which is rather like one of those square-shaped fighting dogs that low men tow about on ropes. Not that you are without a fitful charm, Tom.”

— Hilary Mantel

182. “There are some people in this world who like everything squared up and precise, and there are those who will allow some drift at the margins.”

— Hilary Mantel

183. “One fear creates a dereliction, the offense brings on a greater fear, and there comes a point where the fear is too great and the human spirit just gives up and a child wanders off numb and directionless and ends up following a crowd and watching a killing.”

— Hilary Mantel

184. “I felt a wish to be fictionalized.”

— Hilary Mantel

185. “I spend a lot of my time talking to the dead, but since I get paid for it, no one thinks I’m mad.”

— Hilary Mantel

186. “It is St. Catherine’s Day: in honor of the saint who was threatened with martyrdom on a wheel, we all walk in circles to our destination. At least, that’s the theory. He has never seen anyone over the age of twelve actually doing it.”

— Hilary Mantel

187. “At Smithfield Frith is being shoveled up, his youth, his grace, his learning and his beauty: a compaction of mud, grease, charred bone.”

— Hilary Mantel

188. “He had only thought, and Wolsey had only thought, that the Emperor and Spain would be against it. Only the Emperor. He smiles in the dark, hands behind his head. He doesn’t say which people, but waits for Liz to tell him. ‘All women,’ she says. ‘All women everywhere in England. All women who have a daughter but not a son. All women who have lost a child. All women who have lost any hope of having a child. All women who are forty.”

— Hilary Mantel

189. “I know that, if I took your oath, I should be damned.” “There are those who would envy your insight,” he says, “into the workings of grace. But then, you and God have always been on familiar terms, not so? I wonder how you dare. You talk about your maker as if he were some neighbor you went fishing with on a Sunday afternoon.”

— Hilary Mantel

190. “He saw that it was the gaps that were important, the spaces between the threads which made the pattern, and not the threads themselves.”

— Hilary Mantel

191. “They are en route to Farnham, a small hunting party, when a report is galloped along the road: cases of plague have appeared in the town. Henry, brave on the battlefield, pales almost before their eyes and wrenches around his horse’s head: where to? Anywhere will do, anywhere but Farnham.”

— Hilary Mantel

192. “Fantasy is unconstrained by truth.”

— Hilary Mantel

193. “Gradually, you see, our people are coming into the power they have always thought is their due.”

— Hilary Mantel

194. “As More says, it hardly makes a man a hero, to agree to stand and burn once he is chained to a stake. I have written books and I cannot unwrite them. I cannot unbelieve what I believe. I cannot unlive my life. pg.404.”

— Hilary Mantel

195. “Which of these Thomases saw the blow coming? There are moments when a memory moves right through you.”

— Hilary Mantel

196. “Life is not like detective stories. There is a wider scope for interpretation. The answers to all the questions that beset you are not in facts, which are the greatest illusion of all, but in your own heart, in your own habits, in your limitations, in your fear.”

— Hilary Mantel

197. “Jesus Maria,’ the boy says. ‘The star that guides us to Bethlehem. I thought it was an engine for torture.”

— Hilary Mantel

198. “I would have been a disaster as a career politician. I would never have toed a party line.”

— Hilary Mantel

199. “And indeed, who can doubt that everything would be different and better, if only England were ruled by village idiots and their drunken friends?”

— Hilary Mantel

200. “These are good days for him: every day a fight he can win. “Still serving your Hebrew God, I see,” remarks Sir Thomas More. “I mean, your idol Usury.” But when More, a scholar revered through Europe, wakes up in Chelsea to the prospect of morning prayers in Latin, he wakes up to a creator who speaks the swift patois of the markets; when More is settling in for a session of self-scourging, he and Rafe are sprinting to Lombard Street to get the day’s exchange rates.”

— Hilary Mantel