Hilary Mantel Short Quotes

23 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

Hilary Mantel
So many years of preparation, for what was called adult life: was it for this?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.

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
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
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
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
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
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
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
It is better not to try people, not to force them to desperation. Make them prosper; out of superfluidity, they will be generous. Full bellies breed gentle manners. The pinch of famine makes monsters.

Hilary Mantel