Hilary Mantel Quotes
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Feminism hasn't failed, it's just never been tried.
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Insight cannot be taken back. You cannot return to the moment you were in before.
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The more facts I can have, the better. I can operate very nicely between them, but I am not very good at making things up. I am not sure how ethical it is.
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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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If you are without impulses, you are, to a degree, without joy..." 469
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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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When people begin to talk about "our island story" my hackles rise. It is deluded and conservative.
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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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In my 20s I was in constant pain from undiagnosed endometriosis. With no prospect of a cure, I decided I needed a career - writing - that could accommodate being ill.
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Sometimes peace looks like war, you cannot tell them apart.
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I'm one of these children who grew up at the knee of my grandmother and her elder sister, listening to very old people talk about their memories.
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I am sure that all politicians seek the home connection with the voter. But Margaret Thatcher carried it to extremes.
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I do myself think that history is a set of skills rather than a narrative.
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It is almost a joke, but a joke that nobody tells.
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I once stole a book. It was really just the once, and at the time I called it borrowing. It was 1970, and the book, I could see by its lack of date stamps, had been lying unappreciated on the shelves of my convent school library since its publication in 1945.
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Once you're labeled as mentally ill, and that's in your medical notes, then anything you say can be discounted as an artefact of your mental illness.
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Margaret Thatcher admitted to being the daughter of her father but not the daughter of her mother!
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The word 'however' is like an imp coiled beneath your chair. It induces ink to form words you have not yet seen, and lines to march across the page and overshoot the margin. There are no endings. If you think so you are deceived as to their nature. They are all beginnings. Here is one.
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If you have a good story idea, don't assume it must form a prose narrative. It may work better as a play, a screenplay or a poem. Be flexible.
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In terms of essays, I would say Oliver Sacks. His breadth of hard knowledge and imagination and empathy seems to constitute the perfect mind to me.
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The heart is like any other organ, you can weigh it on a scale.
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I was the subject of an experiment in love. I lived my life under her gaze, undergoing certain trials for her so that she would not have to undergo them for herself. But, how are our certainties forged, except by the sweat and tears of other people? If your parents don't teach you how to live; you learn it from books; and clever people watch you learn from your mistakes.
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I loved Gore Vidal's Burr. That book gave me courage.
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What is it we are hating? It goes beyond politics. I suppose that my fascination with Margaret Thatcher is not just with her political record but with her as a phenomenon.