Top 350 Hilary Mantel Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “Audley pats his arm. He wants to console him. But who can begin to do it? He si the inconsolable Master Cromwell: the unknowable, the inconstruable, the probably indefeasible Master Cromwell.”

— Hilary Mantel

302. “As Danton sees it, the most bizarre aspect of Camille’s character is his desire to scribble over every blank surface; he sees a guileless piece of paper, virgin and harmless, and persecutes it till it is black with words, and then besmirches its sister, and so on, through the quire.”

— Hilary Mantel

303. “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

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

— Hilary Mantel

305. “My list of sins is so extensive that the recording angel has run out of tablets, and sits in the corner with his quill blunted, wailing and ripping out his curls.”

— Hilary Mantel

306. “I had read all the books so hard that when I gave them back the print was faint and gray with exhaustion.”

— Hilary Mantel

307. “He has always rated Anne highly as a strategist. He has never believed in her as a passionate, spontaneous woman. Everything she does is calculated, like everything he does.”

— Hilary Mantel

308. “High spirits are a foolish waste in those destined for the chain gang of marriage and the mill.”

— Hilary Mantel

309. “In his spare moments he is studying to improve his Greek. Old Bishop Fisher was in his seventies when he began the language, and he is not to be bested by a dead prelate. In a year or two, he wishes to be able to join the divines in their subtle dissection of each point of translation.”

— Hilary Mantel

310. “I urge you both, undertake no course without deep thought: but learn to think very fast.”

— Hilary Mantel

311. “Now the elm chest is carried towards the chapel, where the flags have been lifted so she can go in by the corpse of her brother, George Boleyn. “They shared a bed when they were alive,” Brandon says, “so it’s fitting they share a tomb. Let’s see how they like each other now.”

— Hilary Mantel

312. “You think you’re writing one historical novel and it turns into three, and I’m quite used to a short story turning into a novel – that’s happened through my whole career.”

— Hilary Mantel

313. “This is what Henry does. He uses people up. He takes all they give him and more. When he is finished with them he is noisier and fatter and they are husks or corpses.”

— Hilary Mantel

314. “Fiction isn’t made by scraping the bones of topicality for the last shreds and sinews, to be processed into mechanically recovered prose. Like journalism, it deals in ideas as well as facts, but also in metaphors, symbols and myths.”

— Hilary Mantel

315. “Wolsey always said, work out what people want, and you might be able to offer it; it is not always what you think, and may be cheap to supply.”

— Hilary Mantel

316. “If a man should live as if every day is his last, he should also die as if there is a day to come, and another after that.”

— Hilary Mantel

317. “If you knew at twenty what you know at thirty-five, what a marvellous life you could have; on the other hand, you might find that you couldn’t be bothered to have any life at all.”

— Hilary Mantel

318. “But the law is not an instrument to find out truth. It is there to create a fiction that will help us move past atrocious act and face our future. It seems there is no mercy in this world, but a kind of haphazard justice: men pay for crimes, but not necessarily their own.”

— Hilary Mantel

319. “Henry likes to utter his sin and be forgiven. He is sincerely sorry, he will not do it again. And in this case, perhaps he will not. The temptation to cut off your wife’s head does not arise every year.”

— Hilary Mantel

320. “He thinks, the cardinal would have known how best to manage this. Wolsey always said, work out what people want, and you might be able to offer it; it is not always what you think, and may be cheap to supply.”

— Hilary Mantel

321. “When I began to read as an adult, I read almost exclusively novelists of a generation back. I did the Russians, then I started getting more up to date. When you become published and become a reviewer, piles of books come along and you are pushed by fashion and what you are commissioned to do.”

— Hilary Mantel

322. “And the more the king snips and carps, the more do his petitioners seek out the company of Cromwell, so unfailing in his amiable courtesy. At home, Jo comes to him looking perplexed. She.”

— Hilary Mantel

323. “Not prayer nor Bible verse, nor scholarship nor wit, nor grant under seal nor statute law can alter the fact of villain blood. Not all his craft and guile can make him a Howard, or a Cheney, or a Fitzwilliam, a Stanley or even a Seymour: not even in an emergency.”

— Hilary Mantel

324. “His councillors caution, ‘No haste, Majesty. As soon as you choose, you forfeit advantage. You can marry only once.’ ‘Can he?’ Fitwilliam mutters. ‘This is Henry we’re talking about.”

— Hilary Mantel

325. “Only then, Hans would insist on committing another portrait against me.”

— Hilary Mantel

326. “Rafe shrugs. ‘He is frightened of you, sir. You have outgrown him. You have gone beyond what any servant or subject should be.’ It is the cardinal over again, he thinks. Wolsey was broken not for his failures, but for his successes; not for any error, but for grievances stored up, about how great he had become.”

— Hilary Mantel

327. “The king had talked of a ceremony at midsummer. But now there are rumours of plague and sweating sickness. It is not wise to allow crowds in the street, or pack bodies into indoor spaces.”

— Hilary Mantel

328. “It is not written that great men shall be happy men.”

— Hilary Mantel

329. “A man called William Dalyvell, a follower of Merlin and King James, is put into the Tower. He has been spreading a prophecy that the King of Scots will swoop down from the north, expel the Tudors and rule two kingdoms. He also says he has seen an angel. In former ages this would have been a cause for congratulation, but times being what they are, Dalyvell is put on the rack.”

— Hilary Mantel

330. “If I am truthful,’ Norfolk says, ‘I never know what we are meant to talk to women about. They don’t like anything a man likes.”

— Hilary Mantel

331. “If kings do not see you, they forget you. Even though nothing in the realm is done without you, kings think they do it all themselves.”

— Hilary Mantel

332. “You have no right to assume that you’ll be able to write because you could write yesterday.”

— Hilary Mantel

333. “It is prince’s tricks,’ he says. ‘Three days in a row Henry gives the French a private audience. Then he ignores them for a week.”

— Hilary Mantel

334. “England needs roads, forts, harbours, bridges. Men need work. It’s a shame to see them begging their bread, when honest labour could keep the realm secure. Can we not put them together, the hands and the task?”

— Hilary Mantel

335. “The wise councillor must always prepare for his fall.”

— Hilary Mantel

336. “The dead are more faithful than the living. For better or worse, they do not leave you. They last out the longest night.”

— Hilary Mantel

337. “Men pay for crimes, but not necessarily their own.”

— Hilary Mantel

338. “The past changes a little every time we retell it.”

— Hilary Mantel

339. “The glacier knocks in the cupboard, The desert sighs in the bed, And the crack in the tea-cup opens A lane to the land of the dead.”

— Hilary Mantel

340. “As for the future, the king’s desires move swiftly and the law must run to keep up.”

— Hilary Mantel

341. “My daughter Mary is the product of a union illegitimate. If Katherine would not acknowledge the sin in this life, as she would not, then I fear she will suffer for it in the place where she is now.’ Peterborough, he thinks.”

— Hilary Mantel

342. “But Turkish princes have a dozen wives each, ′ Jane says. ‘If the king had been of their sect, he could have been married to the late queen, God rest her, and Katherine, God rest her, and at the same time to me, if he liked. For that matter, he could have been married to Mary Boleyn, and to Mary Shelton, and to Fitzroy’s mother. And the Pope could not have troubled him about it.”

— Hilary Mantel

343. “Forgetting is an art like other arts. It needs dedication and practice.”

— Hilary Mantel

344. “Ambition is a sin. So I am told. Thought I have never seen how it is different from using your talents, which the Bible commands we do.”

— Hilary Mantel

345. “You cannot return to the moment you were in before.”

— Hilary Mantel

346. “You know I’m not a man with whom you can have inconsequential conversations. I cannot split myself into two, one your friend and the other the king’s servant.”

— Hilary Mantel

347. “Repetition of false teachings does not make them true.”

— Hilary Mantel

348. “The feeling around his heart – that it is crushed, forced out of shape – he now understands as a deformity caused by grief.”

— Hilary Mantel

349. “Interesting how our vocabulary responds, providing us with words we have never needed before, words stacked away for us, neatly folded into our brain and there for our use: like a bride’s lifetime supply of linen, or a ducal trove of monogrammed china. Death will overtake us before a fraction of those words are used.”

— Hilary Mantel

350. “You know what you meant. I only know what you said.”

— Hilary Mantel