Top 350 Hilary Mantel Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “When you become a great man, you meet kinsfolk you never knew you had.”

— Hilary Mantel

202. “This visit has compacted the court’s quarrels and intrigues, trapped them in the small space within the town’s walls. The travelers have become as intimate with each other as cards in a pack: contiguous, but their paper eyes blind.”

— Hilary Mantel

203. “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

204. “But our secrets do not keep us. They worry at us; they wear us away, from the inside out.”

— Hilary Mantel

205. “Statements, indictments, bills are circulated, shuffled between judges, prosecutors, the Attorney General, the Lord Chancellor’s office; each step in the process clear, logical, and designed to create corpses by due process of law.”

— Hilary Mantel

206. “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

207. “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

208. “Robespierre has never forgiven his friends the injuries he has done them, nor the kindnesses he has received from them, nor the talents some of them possess that he doesn’t.”

— Hilary Mantel

209. “My father always says, choosing a wife is like putting your hand into a bag full of writhing creatures, with one eel to six snakes. What are the chances you will pull out the eel?”

— Hilary Mantel

210. “Some debts should never be tallied, he says. “I myself, I know what is owed me, but by God I know what I owe.”

— Hilary Mantel

211. “Sometimes it is years before we can see who are the heroes in an affair and who are the victims.”

— Hilary Mantel

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

— Hilary Mantel

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

— Hilary Mantel

214. “He glances up again, and recognizes Gregory’s design. It is a system of holy simplicity: big papers on the bottom, small ones on top.”

— Hilary Mantel

215. “Her hands were large and knuckley and calloused, made to hold a rifle, not a needle.”

— Hilary Mantel

216. “You mustn’t stand about. Come home with me to dinner.’ ‘No.’ More shakes his head. ‘I would rather be blown around on the river and go home hungry. If I could trust you only to put food in my mouth – but you will put words into it.”

— Hilary Mantel

217. “There cannot be new things in England. There can be old things freshly presented or new things that pretend to be old.”

— Hilary Mantel

218. “She was a bossy little woman who approached life with her elbows out.”

— Hilary Mantel

219. “He would have thought God could make his own decisions, but Weston believes the creator may be pushed and coaxed and maybe bribed a little.”

— Hilary Mantel

220. “What does St. Paul mean when he says Jesus was made a little lower than the angels?”

— Hilary Mantel

221. “For many imaginative writers, working for the press is a fact of their life. But it’s best not to like it too much.”

— Hilary Mantel

222. “For hundreds of years the monks have held the pen, and what they have written is what we take to be our history, but I do not believe it really is. I believe they have suppressed the history they don’t like, and written one that is favourable to Rome.’ Henry.”

— Hilary Mantel

223. “It’s not easy to speak of nonexistence, even if you’ve already commissioned your tomb.”

— Hilary Mantel

224. “He would have explained, if he’d known what sort of explanation Wykys would understand. I gave up fighting because, when I lived in Florence, I looked at frescoes every day? He said, “I found an easier way to be.”

— Hilary Mantel

225. “If your going to be ugly it is well to be whole-hearted about it, put some effort in. Georges turned heads.”

— Hilary Mantel

226. “Each action contains its opposite. Each action contains the shadow-trace of the choice not made, the seeds of infinite variation. Each choice, once made, trips contingencies, alternatives; each choice breeds its own universe.”

— Hilary Mantel

227. “Elijah told Ahab that the dogs would lick his blood, and so it came to pass, as you would imagine, since only the successful prophets are remembered.”

— Hilary Mantel

228. “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

229. “If he’s not watering his ale, he’s running illegal beasts on the common, if he’s not despoiling the common he’s assaulting an officer of the peace, if he’s not drunk he’s dead drunk, and if he’s not dead before his time there’s no justice in this world.”

— Hilary Mantel

230. “He thinks, ten years I have had my soul flattened and pressed till it’s not the thickness of paper. Henry has ground and ground me in the mill of his desires, and now I am fined down to dust I am no more use to him, I am powder in the wind. Princes hate those to whom they have incurred debts.”

— Hilary Mantel

231. “He, Cromwell, says to his visitors, just tell them this, and tell them loud: to each monk, one bed: to each bed, one monk. Is that so hard for them?”

— Hilary Mantel

232. “But the nation’s business must go forward, and this is how: an act to give Wales members of Parliament, and make English the language of the law courts, and to cut from under them the powers of the lords of the Welsh marches.”

— Hilary Mantel

233. “He has never told anyone this story. He doesn’t mind talking to Richard, to Rafe about his past – within reason – but he doesn’t mean to give away pieces of himself.”

— Hilary Mantel

234. “The king believes that even if he were not king, he would still be a great man. This is because God likes him. He needs to be liked and he needs to be right. But above all he needs to be listened to, with very close attention. Never enter a contest of wills with the king. Do not flatter him. Instead, give him something he can take credit for. Ask him questions to which you know the answers. Do not ask him the other sort of question.”

— Hilary Mantel

235. “I think, if you’re going to kill a man, do it. Don’t write him a letter about it. Don’t bluster and threaten and put him on his guard.”

— Hilary Mantel

236. “I wonder,” he says, “how it can be that, though all these people think they know the king’s pleasure, the king finds himself at every turn impeded.” At every turn, thwarted: maddened and baffled.”

— Hilary Mantel

237. “One never anticipated the scale of it,” Brissot whispered. “It was planned, yes, and people were paid – but not ten thousand people. Not even the Duke could pay ten thousand people. They acted for themselves.” “And that upsets your plans?” “They have to be directed.” Brissot shook his head. “We don’t want anarchy.”

— Hilary Mantel

238. “Hans nods emphatically, lips pressed together, eyes bright and taunting, like a dog who steals a handkerchief so you will chase.”

— Hilary Mantel

239. “I have noticed,’ she says, ’common men often love their mothers. Sometimes they even love their wives.”

— Hilary Mantel

240. “Camille, a few feet away, looked like a gypsy who had mislaid his violin and had been searching for it in a hedgerow; he frustrated daily the best efforts of an expensive tailor, wearing his clothes as a subtle comment on the collapsing social order.”

— Hilary Mantel

241. “If all the old stories are to be believed, and some people, let us remember, do believe them, then our king is one part bastard archer, one part hidden serpent, one part Welsh, and all of him in debt to the Italian banks.”

— Hilary Mantel

242. “Sometimes,’ he says, ‘I think it would save time and work if all the interested parties came to the council, including foreign ambassadors. The proceedings leak out anyway, and to save them mishearing and misconstruing they might as well hear everything at first hand.”

— Hilary Mantel

243. “A printing press that can write its own books? A mind that thinks about itself? If I don’t have it, at least the King of France doesn’t either.”

— Hilary Mantel

244. “He saw how, as she received the bundle, the woman shuddered from the nape of her neck to her feet. She held it fast though, and a head is heavier than you expect. Having been on a battlefield, he knows this from experience too.”

— Hilary Mantel

245. “The dead wander the lanes of the next life like strangers lost in Venice.”

— Hilary Mantel

246. “John More, Gregory Cromwell, what have we done to our sons? Made them into idle young gentlemen – but who can blame us for wanting for them the ease we didn’t have?”

— Hilary Mantel

247. “I wanted books like a vampire wants blood.”

— Hilary Mantel

248. “I believe, but I do not believe enough.”

— Hilary Mantel

249. “It is not so important, what happens to the body. I have led in some ways a blessed life. God has been good and not tested me. Now he does I cannot fail him. I have been vigilant over my heart, and I have not always liked what I have found there. If it comes into the hands of the hangman at the last, so be it. It will be in God’s hands soon enough.”

— Hilary Mantel

250. “He can see that, in the years ahead, treason will take new and various forms. When the last treason act was made, no one could circulate their words in a printed book or bill, because printed books were not thought of. He feels a moment of jealousy toward the dead, to those who served kings in slower times than these; nowadays the products of some bought or poisoned brain can be disseminated through Europe in a month.”

— Hilary Mantel