Top 350 Hilary Mantel Quotes (2026 Update) [Page 8]

351. “That is how it will be – not pain itself, but the constant apprehension of pain; the constant apprehension of fault, the knowledge that you are going to be punished for something you couldn’t help and didn’t even know was wrong; and the discord in Hell will be constant, repeating.”

— Hilary Mantel

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

— Hilary Mantel

353. “Why would you want the damned fetched back from Hell? There’s a reason God put them where they are.”

— Hilary Mantel

354. “All Hallow’s Day: grief comes in waves. Now it threatens to capsize him.”

— Hilary Mantel

355. “History’s what people are trying to hide from you, not what they’re trying to show you. You search for it in the same way you sift through a landfill: for evidence of what people want to bury.”

— Hilary Mantel

356. “He Thomas, also Tomos, Tommaso and Thomaes Cromwell, withdraws his past selves into his present body and edges back to where he was before. His single shadow slides against the wall, a visitor not sure of his welcome. Which of these Thomases saw the blow coming? There are moments when a memory moves right through you. You shy, you duck, you run; or else the past takes your fist and actuates it, without the intervention of will. Suppose you have a knife in your fist? That’s how murder happens.”

— Hilary Mantel

357. “He was, in all, so clean, so sweet, so golden, that I backed off, afraid he must be American and about to convert me to some cult.”

— Hilary Mantel

358. “Oh yes – can we offer you an escort, Citizen Deputy, to a place of greater safety?’ ‘The grave,’ Camille said. ‘The grave.”

— Hilary Mantel

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

359. “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