Top 350 Hilary Mantel Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 5 of 8

201. “Fantasy is unconstrained by truth.”

— Hilary Mantel

202. “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

203. “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

204. “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

205. “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

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

— Hilary Mantel

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

— Hilary Mantel

208. “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

209. “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

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

— Hilary Mantel

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

— Hilary Mantel

212. “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

213. “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

214. “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

215. “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

216. “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

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. “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

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

— Hilary Mantel

220. “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

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

— Hilary Mantel

222. “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

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

— Hilary Mantel

224. “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

225. “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

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

— Hilary Mantel

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

— Hilary Mantel

228. “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

229. “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

230. “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

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

— Hilary Mantel

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

— Hilary Mantel

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

— Hilary Mantel

234. “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

235. “You have always regarded women as disposable, my lord, and you cannot complain if in the end they think the same of you.”

— Hilary Mantel

236. “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

237. “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

238. “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

239. “Though I have never thought of myself as a book collector, there are shelves in our house browsed so often, on so many rainy winter nights, that the contents have seeped into me as if by osmosis.”

— Hilary Mantel

240. “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

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

— Hilary Mantel

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

— Hilary Mantel

243. “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

244. “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

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

— Hilary Mantel

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

— Hilary Mantel

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

— Hilary Mantel

248. “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

249. “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

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

— Hilary Mantel