Quotes from Hilary Mantel

When Stephen comes into a room, the furnishings shrink from him. Chairs scuttle backwards. Joint-stools flatten themselves like pissing bitches. The woollen Bible figures in the king's tapestries lift their hands to cover their ears.

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 would save them. If you could." "No. There are periods in revolution when to live is a crime, and people must know how to yield their heads if they are demanded. Perhaps mine will be. If that time comes, I won't dispute it.

He, Cromwell, says to his visitors, just tell them this, and tell them loud: to each monk, one bed: to each bed, one monk. Is that so hard for them?

Were you ever at the cathedral in Chartres? You walk the labyrinth," he says, "set into the pavement, and it seems there is no sense in it. But if you follow it faithfully it leads you straight to the center. Straight to where you should be.

They are en route to Farnham, a small hunting party, when a report is galloped along the road: cases of plague have appeared in the town. Henry, brave on the battlefield, pales almost before their eyes and wrenches around his horse's head: where to? Anywhere will do, anywhere but Farnham.

They say she has all the gentlemen of the king's privy chamber, one after another. She don't like delay so they all stand in a line frigging their members, till she shouts, "Next.

Never mind." He thinks, "tomorrow is another battle, tomorrow is another world.

I was just going over London Bridge and I saw someone had attacked the Madonna's statue. Knocked off the baby's head.' 'That was done a while back. It would be that devil Cranmer. You know what he is when he's taken a drink.

he is sui generis, a scholar and a wit.

I think the wolves all died when the great forests were cut down. That howling you hear is only the Londoners.

Not prayer nor Bible verse, nor scholarship nor wit, nor grant under seal nor statute law can alter the fact of villain blood. Not all his craft and guile can make him a Howard, or a Cheney, or a Fitzwilliam, a Stanley or even a Seymour: not even in an emergency.

He thinks, tomorrow is another battle, tomorrow is another world.

Look up and see the wind, For we be ready to sail. Noah's Flood, a miracle play.

There are codes so subtle that they change their whole meaning in half a line, or in a syllable, or in a pause, a caesura.

Of course I have had to rearrange the text a bit— bugger about with it, as Hébert would say.

This is what Henry does. He uses people up. He takes all they give him and more. When he is finished with them he is noisier and fatter and they are husks or corpses.

Well, you know the form,' Bedingfield says. 'She lives in that room and has her ladies – those ones – cook for her over the fire. You knock and go in, and if you call her Lady Katherine she kicks you out, and if you call her Your Highness she lets you stay. So I call her nothing. You, I call her. As if she were a girl that scrubs the steps.

The feeling around his heart—that it is crushed, forced out of shape—he now understands as a deformity caused by grief.

When a man admits guilt we have to believe him. We cannot set ourselves to proving to him that he is wrong. Otherwise the law courts would never function.

History is not the past – it is the method we have evolved of organising our ignorance of the past

what's wrong with you? Or what's wrong with me? Why does everything you know, and everything you've learned, confirm you in what you believed before? Whereas in my case, what I grew up with, and what I thought I believed, is chipped away a little and a little, a fragment then a piece and then a piece more. With every month that passes, the corners are knocked off the certainties of this world: and the next world too.

Would they quarrel so much, if they were indifferent?

It is better not to try people, not to force them to desperation. Make them prosper; out of superfluity, they will be generous. Full bellies breed gentle manners. The pinch of famine makes monsters.