Quotes from Hilary Mantel

Life do your worst; we are plump of knee and mild of eye, we are douce, glib and blithe; we inherit the semi, while others inherit the wind.

By the blood of creeping Christ, stand on your feet." Creeping Christ? he thinks. What does he mean?

They always say, we'll just do another year. It's called the golden handcuffs.

favours that cannot be repaid eat away at the soul. Men scorn to live under an obligation. They would rather be perjurers, and sell their friends.

What I always say is, wars begin in man's time, but they end in God's time.

He thinks of making his fortune. We all know that money sticks to yours hands. No, It passes through them, alas.

Marlinspike goes down to the kitchen, to grow stout and live out his beastly nature. There is a summer ahead, though he cannot imagine its pleasures; sometimes when he's walking in the garden he sees him, a half-grown cat, lolling watchful in an apple tree, or snoring on a wall in the sun.

You cannot return to the moment you were in before.

we are not priests. We don't want their sort of confession. We are lawyers. We want the truth little by little and only those parts of it we can use.

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.

To gentle pressure, King Henry capitulated; the White Rose, aged twenty-four, was taken out into God's light and air, in order to have his head cut off. But there is always another White Rose; the Plantagenets breed, though not unsupervised. There will always

These are days of brutal truth from Tyndale. Saints are not your friends and they will not protect you. They cannot help you to salvation. You cannot engage them to your service with prayers and candles, as you might hire a man for the harvest. Christ's sacrifice was done on Calvary; it is not done in the Mass. Priests cannot help you to Heaven; you need no priest to stand between you and your God. No merits of yours can save you: only the merits of the living Christ.

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

My mother did not need much food - she ran on wrath (pp94)

He who climbs higher than he should, falls lower than he would.

Florence and Milan had given him ideas more flexible than those of people who'd stayed at home.

If you cannot speak truth at a beheading, when can you speak it?

He would have explained, if he'd known what sort of explanation Wykys would understand. I gave up fighting because, when I lived in Florence, I looked at frescoes every day? He said, "I found an easier way to be.

What is a woman's life? Do not think, because she is not a man, she does not fight. The bedchamber is her tilting ground, where she shows her colours, and her theatre of war is the sealed room where she gives birth.

but the air as damp as if the afternoon had been rubbed with snails.

It is not as if it is tales out of Boccaccio.' She laughs. 'They could tell Boccaccio a tale, those sinners at Wolf Hall.

it's just that you are practiced at persuading, and sometimes it's quite difficult, sir, to distinguish being persuaded by you from being knocked down in the street and stamped on.

Coffee was served: bitter and black, like chances missed.

We are taxed till we cry, we must live till we die, we be looted and swindled and cheated and dwindled Ã¢â'¬Â¦ O, Worse was it Never!