Quotes from Hilary Mantel

Thomas Cromwell is now a little over forty years old. He is a man of strong build, not tall. Various expressions are available to his face, and one is readable: an expression of stifled amusement. His hair is dark, heavy and waving, and his small eyes, which are of very strong sight, light up in conversation:

Now listen to me, Crumb. If I say I need to see the Tudor, no blacksmith's boy will say me nay." "He may weld you, my lord," Richard Riche says.

Our possessions outlast us, surviving shocks we cannot; we have to live up to them, as they will be our witnesses when we are gone.

Jane says, 'He asked me if I would be his good mistress.' They exchange glances. There is a difference between a mistress and a good mistress: does Jane know that? The first implies concubinage. The second, something less immediate: an exchange of tokens, a chaste and languorous admiration, a prolonged courtship…

body; he had a second batch of recalcitrant friars to be dispatched to Tyburn, to be slit up and gralloched by the hangman. They were traitors and deserved the death, but it is a death exceeding most in cruelty. The pearls around her long neck looked to him

We say, how did it happen? We ask ourselves." The duke sniffs. "We ask ourselves, but by the steaming blood of Christ we have no bloody answer." The steaming blood of Christ. It's an oath worthy of Thomas Howard, the senior duke.

He wants to ask her, what did you think would come out of this? That you would sit in a turret, and Tom Truth come riding over the hills, his lyre slung behind his saddle? And you at the high window, letting down your strawberry tresses? When Mary Fitzroy stood guard outside the door, did you know how your beau would secure you, with a brutal thrust that made you bleed? Did you know how he would use and spoil you?

A phrase runs through his head – was it Thomas More's? – 'the peace of the hen coop when the fox has run home'. He sees the scattered carcasses

Let us say, his will is convinced, but not his conscience.

But you ought to know,' the king insists. 'Her nature. How ill she has behaved to me, when I gave her everything. All men should know and be warned about what women are. Their appetites are unbounded. I believe she has committed adultery with a hundred men.

Listen, son, this is what I know: right is what you can get away with, and wrong is what they whip you for. As I'm sure life will instruct you, by and by

Masters, it is good pastime to have a wife." When they have listened

Do you know what I hate? I hate to be part of this play, which is entirely devised by him. I hate the time it will take that could be better spent, I hate it that minds could be better employed, I hate to see our lives going by, because depend upon it, we will all be feeling our age before this pageant is played out.

The harder you try to bind him by your deeds, the more he will detest you. I pity you, for there is no way forward for you. He will hate you for your successes as much as your failures.' Truth has done some thinking, while he has been locked away. He says, 'I make sure that my successes are the king's, while my failures are my own.

Usually he is the soul of courtesy. But if you cannot speak truth at a beheading, when can you speak it?

Catalina, Dios la perdone. Catalina, a la que Dios ataca. Catalina, cuyos hijos no arraigaban en el vientre, que es responsable, sin embargo, del triste objeto que tiene ante él, sus ojos apagados, su rostro hinchado por el dolor de muelas. Él piensa en la abuela española de coraza resplandeciente, espejo del destino para el infiel. Isabel salió al palenque: Andalucía tembló.

But he thinks, no, none of us can stand anything. Scrape our skin, and beneath it there is an infant, howling.

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, and somewhere it is written that Cromwell is his name.

distrusted the permanent snare for his temporary opinions.

Any jury would laugh you out of court.' But, he thinks, there will be no jury. There will be no trial. They will pass a bill to put an end to me. I cannot complain of the process. I have used it myself.

They tell us that the rules of power and the rules of war are the same, the art is to deceive; and you will deceive, and be deceived in your turn, whether you are an ambassador or a suitor.

Reculer pour mieux sauter.

Gardiner, he thinks. It may not be proper to call

He feels he is in the torture chamber but he knows that one day he will find the door out, because it is he who has the key.