Quotes from Hilary Mantel

Camille, a few feet away, looked like a gypsy who had mislaid his violin and had been searching for it in a hedgerow; he frustrated daily the best efforts of an expensive tailor, wearing his clothes as a subtle comment on the collapsing social order.

And Louis is weak. Let him give an inch, and some Cromwell will appear.

Men will tell you that they are so in love with you that it is making them ill. They will say they have stopped eating and sleeping. They say that they fear unless they can have you they will die. Then, the moment you given, they get up and walk away and lose all interest. The next week they will pass you by as if they don't know you.

you cannot tell people just part of the tale and then stop, or just tell them the parts you choose.

Nem általánosan elfogadott nézet, nem különösebben népszer? gondolat, hogy az embereket sokféle dolog választja el egymástól, és Å'szintén szólva, a halál a legkevésbé fontosak egyike.

Then I blame our diet. Englishmen were never made to eat fish. Salt water gets in your brain. A German can live on vegetables, he eats what he calls crowte. A Frenchman eats roots and herbs – if he's famished you just turn him out to grass. But an Englishman is bred on bacon and beef.

I do no damage. This is damage, this." He picked up a paper from Camille's desk. "I can't read your writing, but I take it the general tenor is that Brissot should go and hang himself.

Which of these Thomases saw the blow coming? There are moments when a memory moves right through you.

But just as everything was going along politely, quietly and wonderfully — in poured Citizen Danton and his crew.

You once told me, when you visited my house, how Anne conducts herself with men: she says, "Yes, yes, yes, yes, no."' Wyatt nods; he recognises those words; he looks sorry he spoke them. 'Now you may have to transpose one word of that testimony. Yes, yes, yes, no, yes.

The dead do not negotiate.

Right, Thomas Cromwell," she said. "Make a note of this. No strange Dutch drinks. No women. No banned preachers in cellars. I know what you do." "I don't know if I can stay out of cellars." "Here's a bargain. You can take him to a sermon if you don't take him to a brothel.

In the end, Dr Bhattacharya had said, the heart fails without warning.

Young Surrey now lays down his knife and begins to complain. Noblemen, he laments, are not respected as they were in the days when England was great. The present king keeps about himself a collection of men of base degree, and no good will come of it. Cranmer creeps forward in his chair, as if to intervene, but Surrey gives him a glare that says, you're exactly who I mean, archbishop.

It is prince's tricks,' he says. 'Three days in a row Henry gives the French a private audience. Then he ignores them for a week.

The days of the moneylender have arrived, and the days of the swaggering privateer; banker sits down with banker, and kings are their waiting boys.

The Robespierre women (as one tended to think of them now) were all on display. Madame looked actively, rather intimidatingly benevolent; it was her aim in life to find a Jacobin who was hungry, then to go into the kitchen and make extravagant efforts, and say, "I have fed a patriot!".

She held out her hands in a curve around herself, to show how emotion distends you. It makes you feel full up, a big weight in your chest, and then you don't want your dinner.

Who are the Brissotins? A good question. You see, if you accuse people of a crime (for example, and especially, conspiracy) and refuse to sever their trials, then it will at once be seen that they are a group, that they have cohesion. Then if we want to say, you're a Brissotin, you're a Girondist—prove that you're not. Prove that you have a right to be treated separately.

Men like Carew, he knows, tend to blame him, Cromwell, for Anne's rise in the world; he facilitated it, he broke the old marriage and let in the new. He does not expect them to soften to him, to include him in their companionship; he only wants them not to spit in his dinner.

The dead are more faithful than the living. For better or worse, they do not leave you. They last out the longest night.

In this new hall the factions regroup in their old places. Legendre the butcher bawls out a Brissotin: "I'll slaughter you!" "First," says the deputy, "have a decree passed to say that I am an ox.

If your going to be ugly it is well to be whole-hearted about it, put some effort in. Georges turned heads.

Render me the texture of flesh. Pick me what it is, in the timbre of the voice, that marks out the living from the dead.