Quotes from Hilary Mantel

It is the glory of the men who have worked with Cromwell that instead of merely cursing the vermin they have patched, they have mended, they have stretched a point to replace a gnawed vowel; they have been ready to substitute a digested phrase with a clause that will help the crown. . .

Every absent day he loses advantage. If kings do not see you they forget you. Even though nothing in the realm is done without you, kings think they do it all themselves.

Thomas More says that the imperial troops, for their enjoyment, are roasting live babies on spits. Oh, he would! says Thomas Cromwell. Listen, soldiers don't do that. They're too busy carrying away everything they can turn into ready money.

Latimer is a papist, he suspects: but, so far, loyal. 'How do you like Snape Castle?' She wrinkles her nose. 'Well, you know. It's Yorkshire.' She touches his sleeve, nods towards a window embrasure.

Under his clothes, it is well known, More wears a jerkin of horsehair. He beats himself with a small scourge, of the type used by some religious orders. What lodges in his mind, Thomas Cromwell's, is that somebody makes these instruments of daily torture.

For a month he is at home: he reads. He reads his Testament, but he knows what it says. He reads Petrarch whom he loves, reads how he defied the doctors: when they had given him up to fever he lived still, and when they came back in the morning, he was sitting up writing. The poet never trusted any doctor after that; but Liz left him too fast for physician's advice, good or bad, or for the apothecary with his cassia, his galingale, his wormwood, and his printed cards with prayers on.

Recently his son was sent off to learn the art of public speaking, and the result is that, though he still lacks the command that makes for rhetorical sweep, he has become more interested in words if you take them one by one. Sometimes he seems to be holding them up for scrutiny. Sometimes he seems to be poking them with a stick. Sometimes, and the comparison is unavoidable, he seems to approach them with the tail-wagging interest a dog takes in another dog's turds.

And look, Gregory, 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.

in those days his treason stood still to be proved. This is not Italy, boy. We have courts of law.

Men have been known to do anything and everything.

You think the king ever loved you? No. To him you were an instrument. As I am. A device. You and me, my son Surrey, we are no more to him than a trebuchet, a catapult, or any other engine of war. Or a dog. A dog who has served him through the hunting season. What do you do with a dog, when the season ends? You hang it.

all colors of people mingle in the souks and squares. But they do not merge.

Henry stirs into life. "Do I retain you for what is easy? Jesus pity my simplicity, I have promoted you to a place in this kingdom that no one, no one of your breeding has ever held in the whole of the history of this realm.

He was, in all, so clean, so sweet, so golden, that I backed off, afraid he must be American and about to convert me to some cult.

Christ died to free us from the burden of our sin, but he never, so far as she could see, lifted a finger to free us from our stupidity.

Anne climbing the marble steps to Heaven, her good deeds like jewels weighting wrists and neck.

Will they be the same, my lord?

wars begin in man's time, but they end in God's time.

a head is heavier than you expect

What's ink in Whitehall is blood in the borderlands, what's a quibble in the law courts is a stabbing in the streets.

Occam's Razor shaves you closer.

when pleasures you deny yourself turn out not to be pleasures, you're doubly destroyed, for not only do you lose an illusion, you also feel futile

trading in money.

The cardinal, in his days as master of the realm, had spoken of God as if He were a distant policy adviser from whom he heard quarterly: gnomic in his pronouncements, sometimes forgetful, but worth a retainer on account of his experience. At times he sent Him special requests, which the less well-connected call prayers;