Hilary Mantel (Dame Hilary Mary Mantel) Quotes

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

• Mother
• Father
• Choices
• Winter

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Quotes to Explore

• About the most exciting thing a baby can do is burp - I've spent hours of my life holding a baby on my shoulder and patting its back, trying to loosen up a burp. Burping was probably invented to give the father something positive to do, since our chests are not equipped to allow us to do much else.

  

  W. Bruce Cameron
  • Life
  • Up
  • Trying

• If I hadn't spent many years trying to be as compassionate as Mother Teresa, as positive a thinker as W. Clement Stone, as prolific a writer as Stephen King, and as good a speaker as many of the legends I have studied, I would not be as successful as I am today.

  

  Jack Canfield
  • Good
  • Trying
  • Mother

• In uniform, I had to make judgments about the best course of action in combat when the only choices were 'bad' or 'worse.' As a member of the media, I only had to decide how to get the best 'shot' - preferably without getting shot.

  

  Oliver North
  • Bad
  • Action
  • Best

• I am a friend when I need to be a friend, a father when I need to be a father, a musician when music calls. I switch roles accordingly.

  

  A. R. Rahman
  • Music
  • Father
  • Friend

• We started by playing girls who only married at the end of the picture. We didn't play wives. That came later. But the most dreadful thing was when a star had to play a mother. That was the beginning of her professional end.

  

  Lana Turner
  • Mother
  • Star
  • Beginning

• So as I was growing up, my father was always in the middle of making a film or preparing a film. It was a full-time, all-consuming type of operation.

  

  Barbara Broccoli
  • Up
  • Time
  • Father

• From the early days of the Raj, Shakespeare had been woven into the fabric of India's education, and my father understood that in a culture rich with storytelling and fantastical tales, Shakespeare's characters and storylines resonated in a powerful way.

  

  Felicity Kendal
  • Father
  • Culture
  • Education

• My mother taught me a lot of things, but they had big presuppositions built in – like her expectation that I'd be a missionary nurse in a religious order.

  

  Faye Wattleton
  • Mother
  • Religious
  • Expectation

• The debt of gratitude we owe our mother and father goes forward, not backward. What we owe our parents is the bill presented to us by our children.

  

  Nancy Friday
  • Children
  • Mother
  • Father

• She teaches me to be kind, punctual... and to stand up for myself. And when I think about it, aren't these things every mother should teach their daughter?

  

  Kaia Gerber
  • Mother
  • Kind
  • Daughter

• Prosecutors say my father was the biggest crime boss in the nation... If you really want to know what John Gotti was like, you need to talk to my family. We lived this life.

  

  Victoria Gotti
  • Life
  • Family
  • Father

• I came to America when I was 9. My mother brought me.

  

  Samantha Power
  • America
  • Mother
  • Me

• I think some of the pressure comes from the expectations of other people. Like if your father played baseball, they expect you to be the big lifesaver or something when you play a sport.

  

  Barry Bonds
  • People
  • Father
  • Baseball

• What Obamacare does is decreases choices and drives up cost.

  

  Ted Cruz
  • Up
  • Choices
  • Cost

• My father, who was jailed for stealing on more than one occasion, just abandoned his fatherly responsibilities and disappeared. I grew up working from the time I was nine years of age. Money was a big issue everywhere I lived.

  

  Wayne Dyer
  • Up
  • Time
  • Money

• To live in Australia permanently is rather like going to a party and dancing all night with one's mother.

  

  Barry Humphries
  • Live
  • Mother
  • Night

• My father-in-law just happens to be a global procurement guru. Now retired, he was the global head of procurement for some of the biggest companies in the world as well as our very own treasury.

  

  Ian Watson
  • World
  • Father
  • Law

• I was born in a very poor family. I used to sell tea in a railway coach as a child. My mother used to wash utensils and do lowly household work in the houses of others to earn a livelihood. I have seen poverty very closely. I have lived in poverty. As a child, my entire childhood was steeped in poverty.

  

  Narendra Modi
  • Work
  • Family
  • Mother

• If I had not made strategic choices, I would have had far more access to dramatic roles. But the one thing I don't regret, even about bad choices, is that there's always something you can get out of it.

  

  Carol Kane
  • Bad
  • Choices
  • Regret

• My father was a dreamer - my hero. He was a smart, tough guy from Poland, a cutter of lady's handbags, an old socialist-unionist who always considered himself a failure. His big line was: 'Don't end up like me.'

  

  Alan King
  • Up
  • Father
  • Guy

• For in those tacit understandings which maintain the bond of family union, the mother is really the mistress of her daughter only upon the condition of continually presenting herself to her as a model of wisdom and type of perfection.

  

  Alexandre Dumas
  • Mother
  • Wisdom
  • Perfection

• I've managed stations.

  

  Pat Robertson
  • Stations

• Neither, I must say with all due respect, is it the power of teachers and students. Basically the true and real power is with working people of all colors, of all beliefs, of all national origins.

  

  Harry Bridges
  • People
  • Real
  • Power

• 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
  • Mother
  • Father
  • Choices