Quotes from Hilary Mantel

Told me if I did not smell of the fire then I smelled of the frying pan.

The year now is 1774. Poseurs or not, it is time to grow up. It is time to enter the public realm, the world of public acts and public attitudes. Everything that happens now will happen in the light of history. It is not a midday luminary, but a corpse-candle to the intellect; at best, it is a secondhand lunar light, error-breeding, sand-blind and parched.

You must believe everything and nothing of what you read.

como le dijo una vez el rey con tristeza, sólo los hombres y mujeres muy pobres tienen libertad para elegir a quién amar.

Once you have exhausted the process of negotiation and compromise, once you have fixed on the destruction of an enemy, that destruction must be swift and it must be perfect.

There are more English books printed in Antwerp than in London, but those who print without a licence are branded, sometimes an eye is gouged out or a hand cut off. And informers are everywhere. Even, no doubt, amongst our own merchants.

England was always, the cardinal says, a miserable country, home to an outcast and abandoned people, who are working slowly toward their deliverance, and who are visited by God with special tribulations. If England lies under God's curse, or some evil spell, it has seemed for a time that the spell has been broken, by the golden king and his golden cardinal. But those golden years are over, and this winter the sea will freeze; the people who see it will remember it all their lives.

I daresay something will happen, between now and '91, to make your fortunes look up.

A shock will do it, he said, or strong emotion, strong emotion of any sort. It can be horror. Or disgust. But, then again, it doesn't have to be. Sometimes, he said, people die laughing.

If what someone wants from you is an admission, it is never in your interest to give it.

A weak sun blinked at them as they crossed into Hertfordshire, and here and there a ragged blackthorn blossomed, waving at him a petition against the length of winter.

Perhaps I'll grow my beard, he thinks. It would save time. Only then, Hans would insist on committing another portrait against me.

Before they kill her. Alice is no innocent in this world. Just as well. Look how the innocent end; used by the sin-sodden and the cynical, pulped to their purpose and ground under their heels.

God knows," Charpentier said, "I like the present scheme of things very little, but I dread to think what will happen if the conduct of reform falls into hands like yours." "Reform?" Camille said. "I'm not talking about reform. The city will explode this summer.

But whenever good fortune has called on him, he has been there, planted on the threshold, ready to fling open the door to her timid scratch on the wood.

Once the queen's head is severed, he walks away.

Men, it is supposed, want to pass their wisdom to their sons; he would give a great deal to protect his own son from a quarter of what he knows.

Somewhere – or Nowhere, perhaps – there is a society ruled by philosophers. They have clean hands and pure hearts. But even in the metropolis of light there are middens and manure-heaps, swarming with flies. Even in the republic of virtue you need a man who will shovel up the shit.

If you marvel at your good fortune, you should marvel in secret; never let people see you.

Vows to the living may be set aside, with their permission. But the dead do not negotiate.

How torturing, she thought, is the situation of fools who know they are fools; and how pleasant is Claude's state, by comparison.

but will also assuage the fears of the king, who distrusts novelty, and German novelty above all.

The king is at Greenwich,' Brereton says. 'He wants you now.' He has ordinary ways of showing his impatience: slapping his glove against his palm and tapping his foot.

Then the patriots will have de facto control of the city.' Gabrielle: 'What does de facto mean?' 'It means they'll do it now and make it legal later,' Lucile