Mantel Quotes & Sayings

Try always, Wolsey says, to find out what people wear under their clothes. — Hilary Mantel

History is a set of skills rather than a narrative. — Hilary Mantel

I didn't cry much after I was 35, but staggered stony-faced into middle age, a handkerchief still in my bag just in case. — Hilary Mantel

He buys Playboy magazines and looks through them once, then gives them to me. That's what it's like to be rich.
Here's what it's like to be poor. Your wife leaves you because you can't find a job because there aren't any jobs to find. You empty the jar of pennies on the mantel to buy cigarettes. You hate to answer the phone; it can't possibly be good news. When your friends invite you out, you don't go. After a while, they stop inviting. You owe them money, and sometimes they ask for it. You tell them you'll see what you can scrape up.
Which is this: nothing. — Tom Franklin

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

Ask Robespierre. Ask the man with the conscience which is more important, your friend or your country - ask him how he weighs an individual in the scheme of things. Ask him which comes first, his old pals or his new principles. You ask him, Camille. — Hilary Mantel

Men like Carew, he knows, tend to blame him, Cromwell, for Anne's rise in the world; he facilitated it, he broke the old marriage and let in the new. He does not expect them to soften to him, to include him in their companionship; he only wants them not to spit in his dinner. — Hilary Mantel

This is what death does to you, it takes and takes, so that all that is left of your memories is a faint tracing of spilled ash. — Hilary Mantel

A statute is written to entrap meaning, a poem to escape it. — Hilary Mantel

He looks at Norris, exasperated. He seems to think that with eloquence, with sincerity, with frankness, he can change what is happening. The whole court has seen him slobbering over the queen. How could he expect to go shopping with his eyes, and finger the goods no doubt, and not have an account to settle at the end of it? — Hilary Mantel

The hunter is among the most innocent of men; living in the moment makes him feel pure. When he returns in the evening, his body aches, his mind is full of pictures of leaves and sky; he does not want to read documents. His miseries, his perplexities have receded, and they will tay away, provided
after food and wine, laughter and exchange of storeis
he gets up at dawn to do it all over again.
But the winter king, less occupied, will begin to think about his conscience. — Hilary Mantel

It's the living that turn and chase the dead. The long bones and skulls are tumbled from their shrouds, and words like stones thrust into their rattling mouths: we edit their writings, we rewrite their lives. — Hilary Mantel

It's not easy to diagnose because depending where the endometrial deposits are, the symptoms can be quite different. It's an unrecognized problem among teenage girls, and it's something that every young woman who has painful menstruation should be aware of ... it's a condition that is curable if it's caught early. If not, if it's allowed to run on, it can cause infertility, and it can really mess up your life.
[Author Hilary Mantel on being asked about being a writer with endometriosis, Nov 2012 NPR interview] — Hilary Mantel

Life being so short, and the possible books to write so many, it's good to function by night as well as by day; but would anybody become a writer if they realised at the outset what the working hours were? — Hilary Mantel

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

He never lives in a single reality, but in a shifting shadow-mesh of diplomatic possibilities. — Hilary Mantel

All colors of people mingle in the souks and squares. But they do not merge. — Hilary Mantel

Collot is back from Lyon, did you know? He had finished his work, as he describes it. His path of righteousness is very clear and straight and broad. It's so easy to be a good Jacobin. Collot hasn't a doubt or scruple in his
head - indeed, I doubt if he has much in it at all. Stop the Terror? He thinks we haven't even begun. — Hilary Mantel

When Stephen comes into a room, the furnishings shrink from him. Chairs scuttle backwards. Joint-stools flatten themselves like pissing bitches. The woollen Bible figures in the king's tapestries lift their hands to cover their ears. — Hilary Mantel

It is magnificent. At the moment of impact, the king's eyes are open, his body braced for the atteint; he takes the blow perfectly, its force absorbed by a body securely armoured, moving in the right direction, moving at the right speed. His colour does not alter. His voice does not shake.
"Healthy?" he says. "Then I thank God for his favour to us. As I thank you, my lords, for this comfortable intelligence."
He thinks, Henry has been rehearsing. I suppose we all have.
The king walks away towards his own rooms. Says over his shoulder, "Call her Elizabeth. Cancel the jousts. — Hilary Mantel

Call no man happy. Call no man happy until he has gone down to his grave in peace. — Hilary Mantel

I only became a novelist because I thought I had missed my chance to become a historian. — Hilary Mantel

Thomas More, the Lord Chancellor, has put his signature first on all the articles against Wolsey. They say one strange allegation has been added at his behest. The cardinal is accused of whispering in the king's ear and breathing into his face; since the cardinal has the French pox, he intended to infect our monarch. When he hears this he thinks, imagine living inside the Lord Chancellor's head. Imagine writing down such a charge and taking it to the printer, and circulating it through the court and through the realm, putting it out there to where people will believe anything; putting it out there, to the shepherds on the hills, to Tyndale's plowboy, to the beggar on the roads and the patient beast in its byre or stall; out there to the bitter winter winds, and to the weak early sun, and the snowdrops in the London gardens. — Hilary Mantel

'Wolf Hall' attempts to duplicate not the historian's chronology but the way memory works: in leaps, loops, flashes. — Hilary Mantel

It's just that you are practiced at persuading, and sometimes it's quite difficult, sir to distinguish being persuaded by you from being knocked down in street and stamped on.
Pg.406 — Hilary Mantel

When he wakes he has to learn the lack of her all over again — Hilary Mantel

A novel should be a book of questions, not a book of answers. — Hilary Mantel

The old marchioness had him tracing down bed hangings and carpets for her. Send that. Be here. To her, all the world was a menial. If she wanted a lobster or a sturgeon, she ordered it up, and if she wanted good taste she ordered it in the same way. The marchioness would run her hand over Florentine silks, making little squeaks of pleasure. "You bought it, Master Cromwell," she would say. "And very beautiful it is. Your next task is to work out how we pay for it. — Hilary Mantel

Why would I trust a man with my business, if he could not manage his own? — Hilary Mantel

I will read anything by Laura Hillenbrand, Walter Isaacson, Barbara Kingsolver, John le Carre, John Grisham, Hilary Mantel, Toni Morrison, Anna Quindlen and Alice Walker. — Hillary Clinton

I think it's just people. They always hope there may be something better. — Hilary Mantel

At first they'd thought the guillotine would be a sweet, clean business, but when you have twenty, perhaps thirty heads to take off in a day, there are problems of scale. — Hilary Mantel

In the first play, the crisis is Thomas More. In the second it's Anne Boleyn. In the third book, and the third play, it's crisis every day, an overlapping series of only just negotiable horrors. It's climbing and climbing. Then a sudden abrupt fall - within days. — Hilary Mantel

Already there are too many books in the world. There are more every day. One man cannot hope to read them all. — Hilary Mantel

But chivalry's day is over. One day soon moss will grow in the tilt yard. The days of the moneylender have arrived, and the days of the swaggering privateer; banker sits down with banker, and kings are their waiting boys. — Hilary Mantel

Your love of glory must conquer your will to survive; or why fight at all? Why not be a smith, a brewer, a wool merchant? Why are you in the contest, if not to win, and if not to win, then to die? — Hilary Mantel

Talking to Robespierre, one tried to make the right noises; but what is right, these days? Address yourself to the militant, and you find a pacifist giving you a reproachful look. Address yourself to the idealist, and you'll find that you've fallen into the company of a cheerful, breezy professional politician. Address yourself to means, and you'll be told to think of ends: to ends, and you'll be told to think of means. Make an assumption, and you will find it overturned; offer yesterday's conviction, and today you'll find it shredded. What did Mirabeau complain of? He believes everything he says. Presumably there was some layer of Robespierre, some deep stratum, where all the contradictions were resolved. — Hilary Mantel

[The princess] looks out and sees the humble musician with his lute. But unless the musician turns out to be a prince in disguise, this story cannot end well. — 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

I don't have time every day to put on make up. I need that time to clean my rifle. — Henriette Mantel

No man as godly as George, the only fault he finds with God is that he made folk with too few orifices. If George could meet a woman with a quinny under her armpit, he would call out 'Glory be' and set her up in a house and visit her every day, until the novelty wore off. Nothing is forbidden to George, you see. He'd go to it with a terrier bitch if she wagged her tail at him and said bow-wow.'
For once he is struck silent. He knows he will never get it out of his mind, the picture of George in a hairy grapple with a little ratting dog. — Hilary Mantel

We don't have to invite pain in.It's waiting for us:sooner than later — Hilary Mantel

So this morning
waking early, brooding on what Liz said last night
he wonders, why should my wife worry about women who have no sons? Possibly it's something women do: spend time imagining what it's like to be each other. — Hilary Mantel

Give me a book," she said. "A book of sermons, anything."
"What do you want a book for?"
"I want words. I've got to have more words. I was kept stupid on purpose. — Hilary Mantel

He wants to say, because Anne is not a carnal being, she is a calculating being, with a cold slick brain at work behind her hungry black eyes. I believe any woman who can say no to the King of England and keep on saying it, has the wit to say no to any number of men, including you, including Harry Percy, including anyone else she may choose to torment for her own sport while she is arranging her career in the way it suits her. So I think, yes, you've been made into a fool, but not quite in the way you thought. — Hilary Mantel

Novelists, it seems to me, are the very last people who should be asked to comment on the news of the day, and sooner or later, when they have been pilloried for their views, most of them recognise this. — Hilary Mantel

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

Some said the world would end in 1533. Last year had its adherents too. Why not this year? There is always somebody ready to claim that these are the end times, and nominate his neighbor as the Antichrist. — Hilary Mantel

In Paris the swaying lanterns are lit in the streets; lights shine through water, fuzzy, diffuse. Saint-Just sits by an insufficient fire, in a poor light. He is a Spartan after all, and Spartans don't need home comforts. He has begun his report, his list of accusations; if Robespierre saw it now, he would tear it up, but in a few days' time it will be the very thing he needs. Sometimes he stops, half-glances over his shoulder. He feels someone has come into the room behind him; but when he allows himself to look, there is nothing to see. It is my destiny, he feels, forming in the shadows of the room. It is the guardian angel I had, long ago when I was a child. It is Camille Desmoulins, looking over my shoulder, laughing at my grammar. He pauses for a moment. He thinks, there are no living ghosts. He takes hold of himself. Bends his head over his task. His pen scratches. His strange letterforms incise the paper. His handwriting is minute. He gets a lot of words to the page. — Hilary Mantel

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

Because Islam doesn't, he said, his voice toneless, — Hilary Mantel

I dislike pastiche; it attracts attention to the language only. — Hilary Mantel

The Republic is six months old, and it's flying apart. It has no cohesive force - only a monarchy has that. Surely you can see? We need the monarchy to pull the country together - then we can win the war."
Danton shook his head.
"Winners make money," Dumouriez said. "I thought you went where the pickings were richest?"
"I shall maintain the Republic," Danton said.
"Why?"
"Because it is the only honest thing there is."
"Honest? With your people in it?"
"It may be that all its parts are corrupted, vicious, but take it altogether, yes, the Republic is an honest endeavor. Yes, it has me, it has Fabre, it has Hebert - but it also has Camille. Camille would have died for it in '89."
"In '89, Camille had no stake in life. Ask him now - now he's got money and power, now he's famous. Ask him now if he's willing to die."
"It has Robespierre."
"Oh yes - Robespierre would die to get away from the carpenter's daughter, I don't doubt. — Hilary Mantel

All that evening he talked to the Candle of Arras, in a low confidential tone. When you get down to it, he thought, there's not much difference between politics and sex; it's all about
power. He didn't suppose he was the first person in the world to make this observation. It's a question of seduction, and how fast and cheap you can effect it: if Camille, he thought, approximates to one of those little milliners who can't make ends meet - in other words, an absolute pushover - then Robespierre is a Carmelite, mind set on becoming Mother Superior. You can't corrupt her; you can wave your cock under her nose, and she's neither shocked nor interested: why should she be, when she hasn't the remotest idea
what it's for? — Hilary Mantel

Come to that, don't pay out good money for horoscopes. If things are going to go badly for you, is that what you need to know as you saddle up? — Hilary Mantel

I am always translating, he thinks: if not language to language, then person to person. — 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

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

I've got so many ideas, and sometimes the more exhausted my body gets, the more active my mind gets. — Hilary Mantel

Henry stirs into life. 'Do I retain you for what is easy? Do you think it is for your personal beauty? The charm of your presence? I keep you, Master Cromwell, because you are as cunning as a bag of serpents. But do not be a viper in my bosom. You know my decision. Execute it.'
pg. 585 — 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

When a man admits guilt we have to believe him. We cannot set ourselves to proving to him that he is wrong. Otherwise the law courts would never function. — Hilary Mantel

Do you know Camille Desmoulins?" he asked. "Have you seen him? He's one of these law-school boys. Never used anything more dangerous than a paper knife." He shook his head wonderingly.
"Where do they come from, these people? They're virgins. They've never been to war. They've never been on the hunting
field. They've never killed an animal, let alone a man. But they're such enthusiasts for murder. — Hilary Mantel

Gregory is a good boy, though all the Latin he has learned, all the sonorous periods of the great authors, have rolled through his head and out again, like stones. Still, you think of Thomas More's boy: offspring of a scholar all Europe admired, and poor young John can barely stumble through his Pater Noster. Gregory is a fine archer, a fine horseman, a shining star in the tilt yard, and his manners cannot be faulted. He speaks reverently to his superiors, not scuffling his feet or standing on one leg, and he is mild and polite with those below him. He knows how to bow to foreign diplomats in the manner of their own countries, sits at table without fidgeting or feeding spaniels, can neatly carve and joint any fowl if requested to serve his elders. He doesn't slouch around with his jacket off one shoulder, or look in windows to admire himself, or stare around in church, or interrupt old men, or finish their stories for them. If anyone sneezes, he says, 'Christ help you! — Hilary Mantel

[T]he heart is like any other organ, you can weigh it on a scale. — Hilary Mantel

[H]ope takes you by the throat like a stranger, it makes your heart leap ... — Hilary Mantel

Law of Suspects. Suspects are those: who have in any way aided tyranny (royal tyranny, Brissotin tyranny ... ); who cannot show that they have performed their civic duties; who do not starve, and yet have no visible means of support; who have been refused certificates of citizenship by their Sections; who have been removed from public office by the Convention or its representatives; who belong to an aristocratic family, and have not given proof of constant and extraordinary revolutionary fervor; or who have emigrated. — Hilary Mantel

Plain words on plain paper. Remember what Orwell says, that good prose is like a windowpane. Cut every page you write by at least a third. Stop constructing those piffling little similes of yours. Work out what you want to say. Then say it in the most direct and vigorous way you can. Eat meat. Drink blood. Give up your social life and don't think you can have friends. Rise in the quiet hours of the night and prick your fingertips and use the blood for ink; that will cure you of persiflage! But do I take my own advice? Not a bit. Persiflage is my nom de guerre. (Don't use foreign expressions. It's elitist.) — Hilary Mantel

Feminism hasn't failed, it's just never been tried. — Hilary Mantel

You come to this place, mid-life. You don't know how you got here, but suddenly you're staring fifty in the face. When you turn and look back down the years, you glimpse the ghosts of other lives you might have led; all houses are haunted. The wraiths and phantoms creep under your carpets and between the warp and weft of fabric, they lurk in wardrobes and lie flat under drawer-liners. You think of the children you might have had but didn't. When the midwife says, 'It's a boy,' where does the girl go? When you think you're pregnant, and you're not, what happens to the child that has already formed in your mind? You keep it filed in a drawer of your consciousness, like a short story that never worked after the opening lines. — Hilary Mantel

And so it came to pass, as you would imagine, since only the successful prophets are remembered. — Hilary Mantel

Henry says. He mimes a javelin throw: though in the restrained way — Hilary Mantel

I know what you want. One month after the ascension of Philippe the Gullible, M. Laclos found in a gutter, deceased. Blamed on a traffic accident. Two months after, King Philippe found in a gutter, deceased - it really is a bad stretch of road. Philippe's heirs and assigns having coincidentally expired, end of the monarchy, reign of M.Danton. — Hilary Mantel

Her little hands, Crumb. Her little paws, like a child's. She has no guile in her. And she never speaks. And if she does I hate to bend my head to hear what she says. And in the pause I can hear my heart. Her little bits of embroidery, her scraps of silk, her halcyon sleeves, she cut out of the cloth some admirer gave her once, some poor boy struck with love for her...and yet she has never succumbed. Her little sleeves, her seed pearl necklace...she has nothing...she expects nothing...' A tear at last sneaks from Henry's eye, meanders down his cheek and vanishes into the mottled grey and ginger of his beard. — Hilary Mantel

He doesn't believe the dead need our prayers, nor can they use them. But anyone who knows the Bible as he does, knows that our God is a capricious God, and there's no harm in hedging your bets. — Hilary Mantel

Concentrate on sharpening your memory and peeling your sensibility. Cut every page you write by at least one third. Stop constructing those piffling little similes of yours. Work out what it is you want to say. Then say it in the most direct and vigorous way you can. Eat meat. Drink blook. Give up your social life and don't think you can have friends. Rise in the quiet hours of the night and prick your fingertips and use the blood for ink; that will cure you of persiflage! — Hilary Mantel

If life is a chain of gold, sometimes God hangs a charm on it. — Hilary Mantel

But the nation's business must go forward, and this is how: an act to give Wales members of Parliament, and make English the language of the law courts, and to cut from under them the powers of the lords of the Welsh marches. — Hilary Mantel

They say that at Thomas More's trial, Master Secretary here followed the jury to their deliberations, and when they were seated he closed the door behind him and he laid down the law. "Let me put you out of doubt," he said to the jurymen. "Your task is to find Sir Thomas guilty, and you will have no dinner till you have done it." Then out he went and shut the door again and stood outside it with a hatchet in his hand, in case they broke out in search of a boiled pudding; and being Londoners, they care about their bellies above all things, and as soon as they felt them rumbling they cried, "Guilty! He is as guilty as guilty can be! — Hilary Mantel

Suppose within each book there is another book, and within every letter on every page another volume constantly unfolding; but these volumes take no space on the desk. Suppose knowledge could be reduced to a quintessence, held within a picture, a sign, held within a place which is no place. Suppose the human skull were to become capacious, spaces opening inside it, humming chambers like beehives. — Hilary Mantel

Account books form a narrative as engaging as any tale of sea monsters or cannibals. — Hilary Mantel

I think if I hadn't become a writer I would just have suppressed that part of my personality. I think I would have put it in a box that I never opened. — Hilary Mantel

Saint-Just read for the next two hours his report on the plots of the Dantonist faction. He had imagined, when he wrote it, that he had the accused man before him; he had not amended it. If Danton were really before him, this reading would be punctuated by the roars of his supporters from the galleries, by his own self-justificatory roaring; but Saint-Just addressed the air, and there was a silence, which deepened and fed on itself. He read without passion, almost without inflection, his eyes on the papers that he held in his left hand. Occasionally he would raise his right arm, then let it fall limply by his side: this was his only gesture, a staid, mechanical one. Once, towards the end, he raised his young face to his audience and spoke directly to them: "After this," he promised, "there will be only patriots left. — Hilary Mantel

Wolsey sits with his elbows on his desk, his fingers dabbing his closed lids. He takes a great breath, and begins to talk: he begins to talk about England. You can't know Albion, he says, unless you can go back before Albion was thought of. You must go back before Caesar's legions, to the days when the bones of giant animals and men lay on the ground where one day London would be built. You must go back to the New Troy, the New Jerusalem, and the sins and crimes of the kings who rode under the tattered banners of Arthur and who married women who came out of the sea or hatched out of eggs, women with scales and fins and feathers; beside which, he says, the match with Anne looks less unusual. These are old stories, he says, but some people, let us remember, do believe them. — Hilary Mantel

May 29, the Central Committee of the Sections goes into "permanent session" - what a fine, crisis-ridden sound it has, that term! — Hilary Mantel

For it is a truth, that fortune is inconstant, fickle and mutable. — Hilary Mantel

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

For myself, the only way I know how to make a book is to construct it like a collage: a bit of dialogue here, a scrap of narrative, an isolated description of a common object, an elaborate running metaphor which threads between the sequences and holds different narrative lines together. — Hilary Mantel

This was an idea peculiar to Camille, Maximilien thought, that the worse things get, the better they get. No one else seems to think this way. — Hilary Mantel

Gambling is not a vice, if you can afford to do it. — Hilary Mantel

Told me if I did not smell of the fire then I smelled of the frying pan. — Hilary Mantel

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

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

He is careful to deny responsibility for September, but he does not, you notice, condemn the killings. He also refrains from killing words, sparing Roland and Buzot, as if they were beneath his notice. August 10 was illegal, he says; so too was the taking of the Bastille. What account can we take of that, in revolution? It is the nature of revolutions to break laws. We are not justices of the peace; we are legislators to a new world. — Hilary Mantel

I shall be as tender to you as my father was not to me. For what's the point of breeding children, if each generation does not improve on who went before? — Hilary Mantel

There are some strange cold people in this world. It is priests, I think ... Training themselves out of natural feeling. They mean it for the best, of course. — Hilary Mantel

I was (an am) unsure about how I am related to my old self, or to myself from year to year. The hormonal profile of an individual determines much of the manifest personality. If you skew the endocrine system,you loose the pathways to the self. When endocrine patterns change it alters the way you think and feel. One shift in the pattern tends to trip another. — Hilary Mantel

If you help load a cart you get a ride in it, as often as not. It gives him to think, how bad people are at loading carts. Men trying to walk straight ahead through a narrow gateway with a wide wooden chest. A simple rotation of the object solves a great many problems. — Hilary Mantel

And indeed, who can doubt that everything would be different and better, if only England were ruled by village idiots and their drunken friends? — Hilary Mantel

Death is your prince, you are not his patron; when you think he is engaged elsewhere, he will batter down your door, walk in and wipe his boots on you. — Hilary Mantel