Hilary Mantel Quotes
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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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Florence and Milan had given him ideas more flexible than those of people who'd stayed at home.
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History offers us vicarious experience. It allows the youngest student to possess the ground equally with his elders; without a knowledge of history to give him a context for present events, he is at the mercy of every social misdiagnosis handed to him.
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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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It's complementary. It's fairly clear where the boundaries are. When I start telling you the contents of his head, I am making it up. But I try to make it up based on what is on the record. So even my wildest speculations on Thomas Cromwell will have a root somewhere.
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I think if the monarchy were removed tomorrow, it wouldn't have a huge effect on the national mind-set.
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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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There is so much else in the world that is more interesting than monarchy.
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It is all very well planning what you will do in six months, what you will do in a year, but it’s no good at all if you don’t have a plan for tomorrow.
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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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I would have been a disaster as a career politician. I would never have toed a party line.
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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've got so many ideas, and sometimes the more exhausted my body gets, the more active my mind gets.
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The worship of Thomas More goes beyond Catholics.
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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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So many years of preparation, for what was called adult life: was it for this?
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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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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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[H]ope takes you by the throat like a stranger, it makes your heart leap.
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Insight cannot be taken back. You cannot return to the moment you were in before.
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If you are without impulses, you are, to a degree, without joy..." 469
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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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When people begin to talk about "our island story" my hackles rise. It is deluded and conservative.
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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.