Quotes by Hilary Mantel

You learn nothing about men by snubbing them and crushing their pride. You must ask them what it is they can do in this world, that they alone can do.

Men say, Liz reaches for her scissors, I cant endure it when women cry--just as people say, I cant endure this wet weather. As if it were nothing to do with the men at all, the crying. Just one of those things that happen.

He saw that it was the gaps that were important, the spaces between the threads which made the pattern, and not the threads themselves.

By the hairy balls of Jesus

This visit has compacted the courts quarrels and intrigues, trapped them in the small space within the towns walls. The travelers have become as intimate with each other as cards in a pack: contiguous, but their paper eyes blind.

Florence and Milan had given him ideas more flexible than those of people whod stayed at home.

The story of my own childhood is a complicated sentence that I am always trying to finish, to finish and put behind me. It resists finishing, and partly this is because words are not enough; my early world was synaesthesic, and I am haunted by the ghosts of my own sense impressions, which re-emerge when I try to write, and shiver between the lines.

He says in his defence he never meddled with married women, only with virgins.

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.

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.

Innocence is a bleeding wound without a bandage, a wound that opens with every casual knock from casual passers-by. Experience is an armour.

For I chase but one hind, he says, one strange deer timid and wild, and she leads me off the paths that other men have trod, and by myself into the depths of the wood.

To his inner ear, the cardinal speaks. He says, I saw you, Crumb, when you were at Elvetham: scratching your balls in the dawn and wondering at the violence of the king’s whims. If he wants a new wife, fix him one. I didn’t, and I am dead.

A lie is no less a lie because it is a thousand years old. Your undivided church has liked nothing better than persecuting its own members, burning them and hacking them apart when they stood by their own conscience, slashing their bellies open and feeding their guts to dogs.

What is the nature of the border between truth and lies? It is permeable and blurred because it is planted thick with rumour, confabulation, misunderstandings and twisted tales. Truth can break the gates down, truth can howl in the street; unless truth is pleasing, personable and easy to like, she is condemned to stay whimpering at the back door.

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.

I once had every hope,’ he says. ‘The world corrupts me, I think. Or perhaps its just the weather. It pulls me down and makes me think like you, that one should shrink inside, down and down to a little point of light, preserving ones solitary soul like a flame under a glass. The spectacles of pain and disgrace I see around me, the ignorance, the unthinking vice, the poverty and the lack of hope, and oh, the rain – the rain that falls on England and rots the grain, puts out the light in a mans eye and the light of learning too, for who can reason if Oxford is a giant puddle and Cambridge is washing away downstream, and who will enforce the laws if the judges are swimming for their lives? Last week the people were rioting in York. Why would they not, with wheat so scarce, and twice the price of last year? I must stir up the justices to make examples, I suppose, otherwise the whole of the north will be out with billhooks and pikes, and who will they slaughter but each other? I truly believe I should be a better man if the weather were better. I should be a better man if I lived in a commonwealth where the sun shone and the citizens were rich and free. If only that were true, Master More, you wouldnt have to pray for me nearly as hard as you do.

I picked up a snake once. In Italy.Why did you do that?For a bet.Was it poisonous?We didnt know. That was the point of the bet.Did it bite you?Of course.Why of course?It wouldnt be much of a story, would it? If Id put it down unharmed, and away it slid?

When Gregory says, ‘Are they guilty?’ he means, ‘Did they do it?’ But when he says, ‘Are they guilty?’ he means, ‘Did the court find them so?’ The lawyer’s world is entire unto itself, the human pared away.

It is not easy to talk about a condition once dismissed as ‘the career women’s disease’. But women will continue to suffer until we realise the cost of ignoring it