Top 350 Hilary Mantel Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “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

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

— Hilary Mantel

253. “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

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

— Hilary Mantel

255. “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

256. “In a generation everything can change.”

— Hilary Mantel

257. “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

258. “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

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

— Hilary Mantel

260. “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

261. “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

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

— Hilary Mantel

263. “In his day, castles repaired themselves, and all beggars were Christ in disguise.”

— Hilary Mantel

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

— Hilary Mantel

265. “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

266. “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

267. “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

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

— Hilary Mantel

269. “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

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

— Hilary Mantel

271. “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

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

— Hilary Mantel

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

— Hilary Mantel

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

— Hilary Mantel

275. “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

276. “The gift blesses the giver.”

— Hilary Mantel

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

— Hilary Mantel

278. “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

279. “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

280. “There is a time to be silent. There is a time to talk for your life.”

— Hilary Mantel

281. “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

282. “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

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

— Hilary Mantel

284. “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

285. “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

286. “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

287. “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

288. “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

289. “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

290. “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

291. “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

292. “The dead do not negotiate.”

— Hilary Mantel

293. “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

294. “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

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

— Hilary Mantel

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

— Hilary Mantel

297. “If a king cannot have a son, if he cannot do that, it matters not what else he can do. The victories, the spoils of victory, the just laws he makes, the famous courts he holds, these are as nothing.’ It is true. To maintain the stability of the realm: this is the compact a king makes with his people. If he cannot have a son of his own, he must find an heir, name him before his country falls into doubt and confusion, faction and conspiracy. And who can Henry name, that will not be laughed.”

— Hilary Mantel

298. “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

299. “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

300. “Everybody wants something, if only for the pain to stop.”

— Hilary Mantel