Quotes from Hilary Mantel

It is not written that great men shall be happy men.

But chivalry's day is over. One day soon moss will grow in the tilt yard. The days of the moneylender have arrived, and the days of the swaggering privateer; banker sits down with banker, and kings are their waiting boys.

Children's] lives start long before birth, long before conception, and if they are aborted or miscarried or simply fail to materialise at all, they become ghosts in our lives...The unborn, whether they're named or not, whether or not they're acknowledged, have a way of insisting: a way of making their presence felt.

I believe it's fine to give up books even after a page; there's so much to read in the world that will delight you, so why should you work against the grain?

Sometimes I'm at stool all night." 507

He, Cromwell, watches. They are not the same couple from day to day: sometimes doting, sometimes chilly and distanced. The billing and cooing, on the whole, is the more painful to watch." 516

Vadier (on Danton): "We'll clean up the rest of them, and leave that great stuffed turbot till the end." Danton (on Vadier): "Vadier? I'll eat his brains and use his skull to shit in.

The Revolution has got frozen up. They have frozen it up with their talk of moderation. To stand still in Revolution is to slip backwards.

There is no need for unanimity," Saint- Just said. "It would have been desirable, but let's get on. There are only two signatures wanting, I think, besides those who have refused. Citizen Lacoste, you next— then be so good as to put the paper in front of Citizen Robespierre, and move the ink a little nearer.

He feels as if he is floating, and she is weighting him to earth; he would like to put his arms around her and his face in her apron, and rest there listening to her heartbeat. But he doesn't want to mess her up, get blood all down the front of her.

Come to that, don't pay out good money for horoscopes. If things are going to go badly for you, is that what you need to know as you saddle up?

A decade of self-aggrandisement, since his daughter flashed her cunny at the king, has made Boleyn rich and settled and confident.

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 hundreds of years the monks have held the pen, and what they have written is what we take to be our history, but I do not believe it really is. I believe they have suppressed the history they don't like, and written one that is favourable to Rome.' Henry

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.

Cardinal Campeggio has implored Katherine to bow to the king's will, accept that her marriage is invalid and retire to a convent. Certainly, she says sweetly, she will become a nun: if the king will become a monk.

In order not to make a liar out of Henry or Katherine, one or the other, the committee men think up circumstances in which the match may have been partly consummated, or somewhat consummated, and to do this they have to imagine every disaster and shame that can occur between a man and a woman alone in a room in the dark.

Where is Richard, do you know?" "Chopping onions on the back step. Oh, you mean Master Richard? Upstairs. Eating. Where's anybody?

He had only thought, and Wolsey had only thought, that the Emperor and Spain would be against it. Only the Emperor. He smiles in the dark, hands behind his head. He doesn't say which people, but waits for Liz to tell him. 'All women,' she says. 'All women everywhere in England. All women who have a daughter but not a son. All women who have lost a child. All women who have lost any hope of having a child. All women who are forty.

Leases, writes, statutes, all are written to be read and each person reads them by the light of self-interest.

We don't have to invite pain in, he thinks. It's waiting for us: sooner rather than later.

every monarch needs a blow on the head, from time to time.

This is Maximilien de Robespierre, barrister-at-law: unmarried, personable, a young man with all his life before him. Today against his most deeply held convictions he has followed the course of the law and sentenced a criminal to death. And now he is going to pay for it.

In a generation everything can change.