Quotes from Hilary Mantel

I remembered the young man with his broad white smile and his ashen hair streaked with gold; the basted perfection of his firm flesh, and the grace of his hand clasping mine. I slotted the notes back inside, slid my purse away, and wondered: which of my defects did he notice first?

My father doesn't have views. He would like to, but he can't take the risk.

Collot is back from Lyon, did you know? He had finished his work, as he describes it. His path of righteousness is very clear and straight and broad. It's so easy to be a good Jacobin. Collot hasn't a doubt or scruple in his head— indeed, I doubt if he has much in it at all. Stop the Terror? He thinks we haven't even begun.

Statements, indictments, bills are circulated, shuffled between judges, prosecutors, the Attorney General, the Lord Chancellor's office; each step in the process clear, logical, and designed to create corpses by due process of law.

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.

The past changes a little every time we retell it.

It's all right for you, you and Danton. I have to go and stutter for two hours at the Jacobins and probably be knocked down again by maddened violin makers and trampled by all sorts of tradesmen. Whilst Danton spends his evenings feeling up his new girlfriend and you lie around here in a nice fever, not too high. If you're an instrument of destiny, and anyone would do instead, why don't you take a holiday?

The multitude is always desirous of a change. They never see a great man set up but they must pull him down - for the novelty of the thing.

I wonder," he says, "how it can be that, though all these people think they know the king's pleasure, the king finds himself at every turn impeded." At every turn, thwarted: maddened and baffled.

People said— though this felt like a heresy— that they had seen Camille make Robespierre laugh.

She was a bossy little woman who approached life with her elbows out.

At first they'd thought the guillotine would be a sweet, clean business, but when you have twenty, perhaps thirty heads to take off in a day, there are problems of scale.

I felt," he said, "irritated. It seemed a waste, I suppose. To come so far. To cross the sea. To die for . . ." He shrugs. "God knows why.

Exactly," he says. "And look, Gregory, it's all very well planning what you will do in six months, what you will do in a year, but it's no good at all if you don't have a plan for tomorrow.

You can persuade the quick to think again, but you cannot remake your reputation with the dead.

You must, of course. Robespierre doesn't lie or cheat or steal, doesn't get drunk, doesn't fornicate—overmuch. He's not a hedonist or a mainchancer or a breaker of promises." Danton grinned. "But what's the use of all this goodness? People don't try to emulate you. Instead they just pull the wool over your eyes.

Henry likes to utter his sin and be forgiven. He is sincerely sorry, he will not do it again. And in this case, perhaps he will not. The temptation to cut off your wife's head does not arise every year.

I am no one's agent. I am the agent of the law. All the conspiracies pass through my hands. The Committee, you know, draws its present unity from being conspired against. I do not know what would happen if the policy of believing in conspiracies were changed.

Lying gives him a deep and subtle pleasure, so deep and subtle he does not know he is lying; he thinks he is the most truthful of princes.

I felt a wish to be fictionalized.

Beneath every history, another history.

Intrigue feeds on itself; conspiracies have neither mother nor father, and yet they thrive: the only thing to know is that no one knows anything. Though

The migraine angel leaned hard on my shoulder and belched into my face.

He looks down at them and arranges his face. Erasmus says that you must do this each morning before you leave your house: "put on a mask, as it were.