Top 350 Hilary Mantel Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 4 of 8

151. “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

152. “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

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

— Hilary Mantel

154. “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

155. “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

156. “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

157. “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

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. “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

160. “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

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

— Hilary Mantel

162. “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

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

— Hilary Mantel

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

— Hilary Mantel

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

— Hilary Mantel

166. “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

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

— Hilary Mantel

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

— Hilary Mantel

169. “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

170. “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

171. “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

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

— Hilary Mantel

173. “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

174. “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

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

— Hilary Mantel

176. “This relentless bonhomie of yours, I knew it would wear out in the end. It is a coin that has changed hands so often. And now the small silver is worn out and we see the base metal.”

— Hilary Mantel

177. “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

178. “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

179. “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. If your law exacts a penalty, you must be able to enforce it – on the rich as well as the poor, the people on the Scottish borders and the Welsh marches, the men of Cornwall as well as the men of Sussex and Kent.”

— Hilary Mantel

180. “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

181. “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

182. “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

183. “For historians, creative writers provide a kind of pornography.”

— Hilary Mantel

184. “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

185. “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

186. “Fantasy is unconstrained by truth.”

— Hilary Mantel

187. “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

188. “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

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

— Hilary Mantel

190. “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

191. “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

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

— Hilary Mantel

193. “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

194. “In order not to make a liar out of Henry or Katherine, one or the other, the committee men think up circumstances in which the match may have been partly consummated, or somewhat consummated, and to do this they have to imagine every disaster and shame that can occur between a man and a woman alone in a room in the dark.”

— Hilary Mantel

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

— Hilary Mantel

196. “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

197. “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

198. “Henry had sat up: ‘I can do as it pleases me,’ his monarch said. ‘God would not allow my pleasure to be contrary to his design, nor my designs to be impeded by his will.’ A shadow of cunning had crossed his face. ‘And Gardiner himself said so.’ Henry.”

— Hilary Mantel

199. “Leases, writes, statutes, all are written to be read and each person reads them by the light of self-interest.”

— Hilary Mantel

200. “He does not even hate Francis Weston, any more than you hate a biting midge; you just wonder why it was created.”

— Hilary Mantel