Top 350 Hilary Mantel Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

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

— Hilary Mantel

204. “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

205. “Never mind.” He thinks, “tomorrow is another battle, tomorrow is another world.”

— Hilary Mantel

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

— Hilary Mantel

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

— Hilary Mantel

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

— Hilary Mantel

209. “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

210. “When you become a great man, you meet kinsfolk you never knew you had.”

— Hilary Mantel

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

— Hilary Mantel

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

— Hilary Mantel

213. “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

214. “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

215. “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

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

— Hilary Mantel

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

— Hilary Mantel

218. “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

219. “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

220. “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

221. “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

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

— Hilary Mantel

223. “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

224. “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

225. “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

226. “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

227. “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

228. “These are days of brutal truth from Tyndale. Saints are not your friends and they will not protect you. They cannot help you to salvation. You cannot engage them to your service with prayers and candles, as you might hire a man for the harvest. Christ’s sacrifice was done on Calvary; it is not done in the Mass. Priests cannot help you to Heaven; you need no priest to stand between you and your God. No merits of yours can save you: only the merits of the living Christ.”

— Hilary Mantel

229. “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

230. “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

231. “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

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

— Hilary Mantel

233. “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

234. “Life do your worst; we are plump of knee and mild of eye, we are douce, glib and blithe; we inherit the semi, while others inherit the wind.”

— Hilary Mantel

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

— Hilary Mantel

236. “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

237. “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

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

— Hilary Mantel

239. “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

240. “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

241. “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

242. “The multitude,” Cavendish says, “is always desirous of a change. They never see a great man set up but they must pull him down – for the novelty of the thing.”

— Hilary Mantel

243. “I only became a novelist because I thought I had missed my chance to become a historian.”

— Hilary Mantel

244. “Cromwell, suppose you’d been away from England for seven years? If you’d been like a knight in a story, lying under an enchantment? You would look around you and wonder, who are they, these people?”

— Hilary Mantel

245. “Some would think that it ought to come in the course of nature to a woman of thirty-six, a wife and mother. A little calm, a little quiet within – little chance. Even after childbearing, there is blood in your veins, not milk.”

— Hilary Mantel

246. “In a generation everything can change.”

— Hilary Mantel

247. “So much has been said between them that is is needless to add a marginal note. It is not for him now to gloss the text of their dealings, nor append a moral.”

— Hilary Mantel

248. “Once he had watched Liz making a silk braid. One end was pinned to the wall and on each finger of her raised hands she was spinning loops of thread, her fingers flying so fast he couldn’t see how it worked. ‘Slow down,’ he said, ‘so I can see how you do it,’ but she’d laughed and said, ‘I can’t slow down, if I stopped to think how I was doing it I couldn’t do it at all.”

— Hilary Mantel

249. “For it is a truth, that fortune is inconstant, fickle and mutable.”

— Hilary Mantel

250. “Nobody knows how long the arrests wil go on and who else will be taken. He feels even he does not know, and he is in charge of it.”

— Hilary Mantel