Top 350 Hilary Mantel Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “Hans nods emphatically, lips pressed together, eyes bright and taunting, like a dog who steals a handkerchief so you will chase.”

— Hilary Mantel

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

— Hilary Mantel

253. “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

254. “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

255. “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

256. “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

257. “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

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

— Hilary Mantel

259. “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

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

— Hilary Mantel

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

— Hilary Mantel

262. “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

263. “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

264. “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

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

— Hilary Mantel

266. “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

267. “He makes a gesture, designed to impersonate frankness.”

— Hilary Mantel

268. “It was not by a serpent, but by paper and ink that evil came into the world.”

— Hilary Mantel

269. “Henry,” the archbishop says, “I have seen you promote within your own court and council persons whose principles and morals will hardly bear scrutiny. I have seen you deify your own will and appetite, to the sorrow and scandal of Christian people. I have been loyal to you, to the point of violation of my own conscience. I have done much for you, but now I have done the last thing I will ever do.”

— Hilary Mantel

270. “He cannot lock us all up.” “He has prisons enough.” “For bodies, yes. But what are bodies? He can take our goods, but God will prosper us. He can close the booksellers, but still there will be books. They have their old bones, their glass saints in windows, their candles and shrines, but God has given us the printing press.”

— Hilary Mantel

271. “The gift blesses the giver.”

— Hilary Mantel

272. “I never know why Hope is accounted a virtue,” Camille said. “It seems so selfserving.”

— Hilary Mantel

273. “Henry glares at him. “I will say this for you. You stick by your man.” “I have never had anything from the cardinal other than kindness. Why would I not?”

— Hilary Mantel

274. “He admires these speculative worlds, that grow up in the crevices between truths.”

— Hilary Mantel

275. “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

276. “You can be merry with the king, you can share a joke with him. But as Thomas More used to say, it’s like sporting with a tamed lion. You tousle its mane and pull its ears, but all the time you’re thinking, those claws, those claws, those claws.”

— Hilary Mantel

277. “I remembered the young man with his broad white smile and his ashen hair streaked with gold; the basted perfection of his firm flesh, and the grace of his hand clasping mine. I slotted the notes back inside, slid my purse away, and wondered: which of my defects did he notice first?”

— Hilary Mantel

278. “And Louis is weak. Let him give an inch, and some Cromwell will appear.”

— Hilary Mantel

279. “My lord Norfolk curses the day laymen began to read the scriptures. “Blessed are the meek!” he says. “With all respect to our Saviour, you don’t want that notion to get around an army camp.”

— Hilary Mantel

280. “Is a woman bound to wifely obedience, when the result will be to turn her out of the estate of wife?”

— Hilary Mantel

281. “They have never had a harsh word till today, he thinks, and perhaps what has passed is less harsh than sad: that a son can think evil of his father as if he is a stranger and you cannot tell what he might do; as if he is a traveller on the road, who might bless your journey and cheer you on, or equally rob you and roll you in a ditch.”

— Hilary Mantel

282. “Queen Katherine, whose boys have all died, takes it patiently: that is to say, she suffers.”

— Hilary Mantel

283. “When he was at the Vatican, in Cardinal Bainbridge’s day, he quickly saw that no one in the papal court grasped what was happening, ever; and least of all the Pope. Intrigue feeds on itself; conspiracies have neither mother nor father, and yet they thrive: the only thing to know is that no one knows anything.”

— Hilary Mantel

284. “They have been witnessing miracles at Thetford for three hundred years, ever since they turned up a cache of relics, neatly labelled, that included rocks from Mount Calvary, part of Our Lady’s sepulchre, and fragments of the manger in which the child Jesus was laid. Now comes the greatest miracle of all, Thomas Cromwell, the Putney boy: who holds that the passage of time does not add lustre to fakes, and that there is no need to reverence a lie because of its antiquity.”

— Hilary Mantel

285. “Florence and Milan had given him ideas more flexible than those of people who’d stayed at home.”

— Hilary Mantel

286. “Would they quarrel so much, if they were indifferent?”

— Hilary Mantel

287. “Innocence is a bleeding wound without a bandage, a wound that opens with every casual knock from casual passers-by. Experience is an armour.”

— Hilary Mantel

288. “When the cardinal came to a closed door he would flatter it – oh beautiful yielding door! Then he would try tricking it open. And you are just the same, just the same.” He pours himself some of the duke’s present. “But in the last resort, you just kick it in.”

— Hilary Mantel

289. “You can persuade the quick to think again, but you cannot remake your reputation with the dead.”

— Hilary Mantel

290. “But who would hold up his head, if people judged us by what we were like at twenty?”

— Hilary Mantel

291. “The fate of peoples is made like this, two men in small rooms. Forget the coronations, the conclaves of cardinals, the pomp and processions. This is how the world changes: a counter pushed across a table, a pen stroke that alters the force of a phrase, a woman’s sigh as she passes and leaves on the air a trail of orange flower or rose water; her hand pulling close the bed curtain, the discreet sigh of flesh against flesh.”

— Hilary Mantel

292. “Even when she said her last words, asking the people to pray for the king, she was looking over the head of the crowd. Still, she did not let hope weaken her. Few women are so resolute at the last, and not many men.”

— Hilary Mantel

293. “Well, you know the form,’ Bedingfield says. ‘She lives in that room and has her ladies – those ones – cook for her over the fire. You knock and go in, and if you call her Lady Katherine she kicks you out, and if you call her Your Highness she lets you stay. So I call her nothing. You, I call her. As if she were a girl that scrubs the steps.”

— Hilary Mantel

294. “When I was small I dreamed of demons. I thought they were under my bed, but you said, it can’t be so, you don’t get demons our side of the river, the guards won’t let them over London Bridge.”

— Hilary Mantel

295. “Intrigue feeds on itself; conspiracies have neither mother nor father, and yet they thrive: the only thing to know is that no one knows anything. Though.”

— Hilary Mantel

296. “That’s the point of a promise, he thinks. It wouldn’t have any value, if you could see what it would cost you when you made it.”

— Hilary Mantel

297. “The cardinal used to say, Cromewll will do in a week what will take another man a year, it is not worth your while to block him or oppose him. If you reach out to grip him he will not be there, he will have ridden twenty miles while you are pulling your boots on.”

— Hilary Mantel

298. “God loves us, after all; He manifests it in cancer, cholera, Siamese twins. Not all forms of love are comprehensible, and some forms of love destroy what they touch.”

— Hilary Mantel

299. “Georges told me he would be back, and I have no reason to disbelieve him – but perhaps you’d like to sit down here and write him a letter? Tell him you can’t manage the thing without him, which is true. Tell him Robespierre says he can’t get along without him. And when you’re done, you might go and find Robespierre and ask him to call. He is such a steadying influence when Camille is killing himself.”

— Hilary Mantel

300. “The dead do not negotiate.”

— Hilary Mantel