Hilary Mantel Quotes
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He thinks, I remembered you, Thomas More, but you didn't remember me. You never even saw me coming.
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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.
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I think I would have been a reasonably good lawyer. I have a faculty for making sense of mountains of information.
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I am very happy in second-hand bookshops; would a gardener not be happy in a garden?
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Florence and Milan had given him ideas more flexible than those of people who'd stayed at home.
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Watching live actors onstage, in something that changes night by night, real people picking up cues from each other, it concentrates you on the process rather than the result.
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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?
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I dislike pastiche; it attracts attention to the language only.
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Fear of commitment lies behind the fear of writing.
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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.
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So many years of preparation, for what was called adult life: was it for this?
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There is so much else in the world that is more interesting than monarchy.
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[H]ope takes you by the throat like a stranger, it makes your heart leap.
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I've got so many ideas, and sometimes the more exhausted my body gets, the more active my mind gets.
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She is very plain. What does Henry see in her?'" "He thinks she's stupid. He finds it restful.
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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.
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Insight cannot be taken back. You cannot return to the moment you were in before.
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People who wrote literary novels about the past probably didn't want them pegged as historical fiction. Certainly that was true in England.
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If you are without impulses, you are, to a degree, without joy..." 469
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Margaret Thatcher was pretending that running a country was like running a household, which she knew wasn't true.
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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.
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I spend a lot of my time talking to the dead, but since I get paid for it, no one thinks I'm mad.
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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.
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I am not a historian. I don't see what I do as being a rival to biography.