Hilary Mantel Quotes

33 Sourced Quotes

At New Year's he had given Anne a present of silver forks with handles of rock crystal. He hopes she will use them to eat with, not to stick in people.

Hilary Mantel
Truth can break the gates down, truth can howl in the street; unless truth is pleasing, personable and easy to like, she is condemned to stay whimpering at the back door.

Hilary Mantel
You're only young once, they say, but doesn't it go on for a long time? More years than you can bear.

Hilary Mantel
For what's the point of breeding children, if each generation does not improve on what went before.

Hilary Mantel
When I was thin, I had no notion of what being fat is like. When I worked in a department store, I had sold clothes to women of most sizes, so I should have known; but perhaps you have to experience the state from the inside, to understand what fat is like.

Hilary Mantel
You can have a silence full of words. A lute retains, in its bowl, the notes it has played. The viol, in its strings, holds a concord. A shriveled petal can hold its scent, a prayer can rattle with curses; an empty house, when the owners have gone out, can still be loud with ghosts.

Hilary Mantel
The things you think are the disasters in your life are not the disasters really. Almost anything can be turned around: out of every ditch, a path, if you can only see it.

Hilary Mantel
If you are without impulses, you are, to a degree, without joy...

Hilary Mantel
He turns to the painting. "I fear Mark was right." "Who is Mark?" "A silly little boy who runs after George Boleyn. I once heard him say I looked like a murderer." Gregory says, "Did you not know?

Hilary Mantel
You mustn't stand about. Come home with me to dinner.' 'No.' More shakes his head. 'I would rather be blown around on the river and go home hungry. If I could trust you only to put food in my mouth – but you will put words into it.

Hilary Mantel
But who would hold up his head, if people judged us by what we were like at twenty?

Hilary Mantel
The word 'however' is like an imp coiled beneath your chair. It induces ink to form words you have not yet seen, and lines to march across the page and overshoot the margin. There are no endings. If you think so you are deceived as to their nature. They are all beginnings. Here is one.

Hilary Mantel
Florence and Milan had given him ideas more flexible than those of people who'd stayed at home.

Hilary Mantel
God takes out your heart of flesh, and gives you a heart of stone.

Hilary Mantel
You don't get on by being original. You don't get on by being bright. You don't get on by being strong. You get on by being a subtle crook.

Hilary Mantel
The contradictions and the awkwardness—that's what gives historical fiction its value.

Hilary Mantel
Things get passed around so easily on the Internet. Fact becomes fiction and fiction becomes fact.

Hilary Mantel
You learn nothing about men by snubbing them and crushing their pride. You must ask them what it is they can do in this world, that they alone can do.

Hilary Mantel
There's a feeling of power in reserve, a power that drives right through the bone, like the shiver you sense in the shaft of an axe when you take it into your hand. You can strike, or you can not strike, and if you choose to hold back the blow, you can still feel inside you the resonance of the omitted thing.

Hilary Mantel
When you are writing laws you are testing words to find their utmost power. Like spells, they have to make things happen in the real world, and like spells, they only work if people believe in them.

Hilary Mantel
He thinks, I remembered you, Thomas More, but you didn't remember me. You never even saw me coming.

Hilary Mantel
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
Why are we so attached to the severities of the past? Why are we so proud of having endured our fathers and our mothers, the fireless days and the meatless days, the cold winters and the sharp tongues? It's not as if we had a choice.

Hilary Mantel
No ruler in the world has ever been able to afford a war. They're not affordable things. No prince ever says, 'This is my budget, so this is the kind of war I can have.' You enter into one and it uses up all the money you've got, and then it breaks you and bankrupts you.

Hilary Mantel
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
Kate Middleton, as she was, appeared to have been designed by a committee and built by craftsmen, with a perfect plastic smile and the spindles of her limbs hand-turned and gloss-varnished.
Of the Duchess of Cambridge

Hilary Mantel
Some of these things are true and some of them lies. But they are all good stories.

Hilary Mantel
When you have committed enough words to paper, you feel you have a spine stiff enough to stand up in the wind. But when you stop writing, you find that's all you are - a spine, a row of rattling vertebrae, dried out like an old quill pen.

Hilary Mantel
Insight cannot be taken back. You cannot return to the moment you were in before.

Hilary Mantel
Over the city lies the sweet, rotting odor of yesterday's unrecollected sins.

Hilary Mantel