Quotes from Hilary Mantel

It is a wan morning, low unbroken cloud; the light, filtering sparely through glass, is the color of tarnished pewter. How brightly colored the king is, like the king in a new pack of cards: how small his flat blue eye. There

You have no right to assume that you'll be able to write because you could write yesterday.

That's what we want, he thinks: help in prosperity. . . We never know how to take it when our life begins to be charmed.

When he was at the Vatican, in Cardinal Bainbridge's day, he quickly saw that no one in the papal court grasped what was happening, ever; and least of all the Pope. 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.

Her hands were large and knuckley and calloused, made to hold a rifle, not a needle.

And the more the king snips and carps, the more do his petitioners seek out the company of Cromwell, so unfailing in his amiable courtesy. At home, Jo comes to him looking perplexed. She

And I thought I would win him, I really thought I would, for he was tenacious of the world, tenacious of his person, and had a good deal to live for. In the end he was his own murderer. He wrote and wrote and he talked and talked, then suddenly at a stroke he cancelled himself. If ever a man came close to beheading himself, Thomas More was that man.

Why would you want the damned fetched back from Hell? There's a reason God put them where they are.

Some debts should never be tallied, he says. "I myself, I know what is owed me, but by God I know what I owe.

Cromwell, suppose you'd been away from England for seven years? If you'd been like a knight in a story, lying under an enchantment? You would look around you and wonder, who are they, these people?

He glances up again, and recognizes Gregory's design. It is a system of holy simplicity: big papers on the bottom, small ones on top.

In the year 1257, an elephant died in the Tower menagerie and was buried in a pit near the chapel. But the following year he was dug up and his remains sent to Westminster Abbey. Now, what did they want at Westminster Abbey, with the remains of an elephant? If not to carve a ton of relics out of him, and make his animal bones into the bones of saints?

Martyr More,' he says. 'The word is in Rome that he and Fisher are to be made saints.

He did not relish the topic; he sensed in Jane Rochford's tone the peculiar cruelty of women. They fight with the poor weapons God has bestowed – spite, guile, skill in deceit – and it is likely that in conversations between themselves they trespass in places where a man would never trust his footing.

In his spare moments he is studying to improve his Greek. Old Bishop Fisher was in his seventies when he began the language, and he is not to be bested by a dead prelate. In a year or two, he wishes to be able to join the divines in their subtle dissection of each point of translation

The wise councillor must always prepare for his fall.

So much has been said between them that is is needless to add a marginal note. It is not for him now to gloss the text of their dealings, nor append a moral.

So much has been said between them that it is needless to add a marginal note. It is not for him now to gloss the text of their dealings, nor append a moral.

He saw how, as she received the bundle, the woman shuddered from the nape of her neck to her feet. She held it fast though, and a head is heavier than you expect. Having been on a battlefield, he knows this from experience too.

You are only young once, they say, but doesn't go on for a long time? More years than you can bear.

That's the point of a promise, he thinks. It wouldn't have any value, if you could see what it would cost you when you made it.

At Smithfield Frith is being shoveled up, his youth, his grace, his learning and his beauty: a compaction of mud, grease, charred bone.

Men pay for crimes, but not necessarily their own.

But who would hold up his head, if people judged us by what we were like at twenty?