Quotes from Hilary Mantel

Sometimes,' he says, 'I think it would save time and work if all the interested parties came to the council, including foreign ambassadors. The proceedings leak out anyway, and to save them mishearing and misconstruing they might as well hear everything at first hand.

Tell me, why do you think I do this?" The king sounds curious. "Out of lust? Is that what you think?" Kill a cardinal? Divide your country? Split the church? 'Seems extravagant,' Chapuys murmurs.

CAMILLE DESMOULINS: For the establishment of liberty and the safety of the nation, one day of anarchy will do more than ten years of National Assemblies.

Oh, you are not disappointing," Henry says. "But the moment you are, I will let you know.

Provence and Artois will be back. Antoinette. She will resume her state. The priests will be back. Children now in their cradles will suffer for what their fathers and mothers did.' Marat leaned forward, his body hunched, his eyes intent, as he did when he spoke from the tribune at the Jacobins. 'It will be an abattoir, an abattoir of a nation.

Some people know they are condemned; some have time to pray, and others die struggling and screaming, fighting to their last breath. An irate killer stamps in to the tribunal—"Use your heads, give us a bloody chance, can't you? We can't keep up." So the prisoners are waved away airily by their judges—"Go, you're free." Outside the door a steady man waits to fell them. Freedom is the last thing they know.

The cardinal used to say, Cromewll will do in a week what will take another man a year, it is not worth your while to block him or oppose him. If you reach out to grip him he will not be there, he will have ridden twenty miles while you are pulling your boots on.

he feels an irrational dislike taking root, and he tries to dismiss it, because he prefers his dislikes rational, but after all, these circumstances are extreme...

But the law is not an instrument to find out truth. It is there to create a fiction that will help us move past atrocious acts and face our future. It seems there is no mercy in this world, but a kind of haphazard justice: men pay for crimes, but not necessarily their own.

You have always regarded women as disposable, my lord, and you cannot complain if in the end they think the same of you.

Men, it is supposed want to pass their wisdom to their sons; he would give a great deal to protect his own son from a quartr of what he knows.

And your man?' He hesitates. 'Long dead too?' It is the most delicate way that can be contrived, to ask a man if he has killed someone.

And they say [money's] the root of all evil. Well, Protestants say that. Catholics know better.

I wanted books like a vampire wants blood.

If life is a chain of gold, sometimes God hangs a charm on it.

I think it's just people. They always hope there may be something better.

Repetition of false teachings does not make them true.

The king has great power, but he has no power to know me, except through what I say and what I do.

You know what you meant. I only know what you said.

Some would think that it ought to come in the course of nature to a woman of thirty-six, a wife and mother. A little calm, a little quiet within - little chance. Even after childbearing, there is blood in your veins, not milk.

Tom Truth says, 'I do not know if I wrote this verse.' 'You have forgot it,' he says. 'As would any man of sense. Yet in the fifth stanza you write, Pardon me, your man, Tom Truth. Which you rhyme, unfortunately, with growth.' Christophe sniggers. 'Even I know better, and I am French.

In these matters, the cardinal says, there is no measure of time; these spirits slip from our hands and through the ages, serpentine, mutable, sly.

Jane is shaking. 'They are too much burdened with taxes.' The king leans forward. 'The burdens of tax do not rest on the shoulders of labourers, or small husbandmen. Dives, the rich man, knows and has always known how to pass off his interests as the interests of Lazarus, the beggar.

1776: A declaration of the Parlement of Paris: The first rule of justice is to conserve for each individual that which belongs to him. This is a fundamental rule of natural law, human rights and civil government; a rule which consists not only in maintaining the rights of property, but also those rights vested in the individual and derived from prerogatives of birth and social position.