Quotes from Hilary Mantel

Henry glares at him. "I will say this for you. You stick by your man." "I have never had anything from the cardinal other than kindness. Why would I not?

Interesting how our vocabulary responds, providing us with words we have never needed before, words stacked away for us, neatly folded into our brain and there for our use: like a bride's lifetime supply of linen, or a ducal trove of monogrammed china. Death will overtake us before a fraction of those words are used.

Movements are restricted. Even a duke must manage with only six men to guard and serve him. Strangers are barred. Delivery men must quit the precincts as soon as they have dropped off their loads, and the royal nursery be scrubbed out twice a day.

The old always think the world is getting worse; it is for the young, equipped with historical facts, to point out that, compared with 1509, or even 1939, life in 2009 is sweet as honey.

Mirabeau: "If you have been told to clear us from this hall, you must ask for orders to use force. We shall leave our seats only at bayonet point. The King can cause us to be killed; tell him we all await death; but he need not hope that we shall separate until we have made the constitution." Audible only to his neighbor, he adds, "If they come, we bugger off, quick.

I wonder what I've married into," Morgan Williams says. But really, this is just something Morgan says; some men have a habitual sniffle, some women have a headache, and Morgan has this wonder.

There is a time to be silent. There is a time to talk for your life.

And indeed, who can doubt that everything would be different and better, if only England were ruled by village idiots and their drunken friends?

The princess] looks out and sees the humble musician with his lute. But unless the musician turns out to be a prince in disguise, this story cannot end well.

Even in the republic of virtue you need a man who will shovel up the shit.

Gradually, you see, our people are coming into the power they have always thought is their due.

You shouldn't believe in ghosts,' he says uncertainly. 'I don't,' Martian says. 'But who are they to care, if I believe in them or not?

He is tired of trying to wake up different. . . He is what the mirror makes, when it assembles him each day. . . Unless you have a better idea?

They have never had a harsh word till today, he thinks, and perhaps what has passed is less harsh than sad: that a son can think evil of his father as if he is a stranger and you cannot tell what he might do; as if he is a traveller on the road, who might bless your journey and cheer you on, or equally rob you and roll you in a ditch.

He does not even hate Francis Weston, any more than you hate a biting midge; you just wonder why it was created.

I never know why Hope is accounted a virtue," Camille said. "It seems so selfserving.

Only then, Hans would insist on committing another portrait against me.

Todos os rios correm para o mar, e o mar não se enche.

I am in mourning for myself. With these papers, my usefulness gone. I could not do it again: the years of sleepless toil, the brute moral deformation. . .

Even when she said her last words, asking the people to pray for the king, she was looking over the head of the crowd. Still, she did not let hope weaken her. Few women are so resolute at the last, and not many men.

My father always says, choosing a wife is like putting your hand into a bag full of writhing creatures, with one eel to six snakes. What are the chances you will pull out the eel?

One of the French lords says, "To lose gracefully is an art that every gentleman cultivates." "I hope to cultivate it too," he says. "If you see an example I might follow, please point it out.

Now the elm chest is carried towards the chapel, where the flags have been lifted so she can go in by the corpse of her brother, George Boleyn. "They shared a bed when they were alive," Brandon says, "so it's fitting they share a tomb. Let's see how they like each other now.

The way I tell it, he says to Fitzwilliam, you would think that the blow on the head had improved him. That he actually set out to get it. That every monarch needs a blow on the head, from time to time.