Quotes from Hilary Mantel

my great-aunts and uncles died in wards like those. Wrapping and muffling themselves, gazing at the long windows streaming rain, visitors would tell the patient: 'You're in the best place.

Try to work on the scale of eternity. Do you see? Otherwise you will be fettered by trivia. The daily frustrations will cripple you.

by the thrice-beshitten shroud of Lazarus!

he's going out with Suffolk; you'll have to

He is thinking of a ring, engraved with proverbs in praise of obedience. Obedience binds us together; all practise it, under God. It is the condition of our living as humans, in cities and dwelling houses, not in hides and holes in the fields. Even beasts defer to the lion: beasts show wisdom and policy thereby.

No: these are the complaints of small landowners, and men who don't like to pay their taxes. Men who want to be petty kings in their shires, who want the women to curtsey as they pass through the marketplace. I know these paltry gods, he thinks. We had them in Putney. They have them everywhere.

if you're dead, Peterborough is as good a place as any.

Henry looks irritated. He should not have to manage this. Cromwell is supposed to manage it for him. Ease out the Boleyns, ease in the Seymours. His business is more kingly: praying for the success of his enterprises, and writing songs for Jane.

There cannot be new things in England. There can be old things freshly presented, or new things that pretend to be old. To be trusted, new men must forge themselves an ancient pedigree, like Walter's, or enter into the service of ancient families. Don't try to go it alone, or they'll think you're pirates.

he kissed the infant's fluffy skull and said, I shall be as tender to you as my father was not to me. For what's the point of breeding children if each generation does not improve on what went before.

They say that Cain invented cities. And if it was not he, it was someone else fond of murder.

Call yourself d'Anton,' he advised. 'It makes a better impression.' On whom? Well, not on the real nobility; but so much civil litigation is pressed by the massed ranks of the socially insecure. 'So what if they all know it's spurious?' Maître Vinot said. 'It shows the right kind of urges. Have comprehensible ambitions, dear boy. Keep us comfortable.

Di che natura è il limite fra la verità e la menzogna? È permeabile e sfocato, poiché è disseminato di voci, dicerie, malintesi e storie alterate. La verità può buttare giù i cancelli, può urlare per strada; se però non è piacevole, gradita e facile da accettare, è condannata a piagnucolare davanti alla porta di servizio.

The dead do not come back to complain of their burial. It is the living who are exercised about these matters.

His stepson was fourteen years old when he removed his noisy and overgrown presence to

All Hallow's Day: grief comes in waves. Now it threatens to capsize him.

He was terribly afraid that happiness might be a habit, or a quality knitted into the temperament, or it might be something you learn when you're a child, a kind of language harder than Latin or Greek, that you should have a grasp on by the time you're seven. What if you haven't got that grasp? What if you're in some way happiness-stupid, happiness-blind?

Let the begrudgers behold us!

And I begin to see it. How a man may hardly know his sister, and meet her as a grown woman. She is like himself, yet not. She is familiar, yet piques his interest. One day his brotherly embrace is a little longer than usual. The business progresses from there. Perhaps neither party feels they are doing anything wrong, till some frontier is crossed.

And I ask you—a woman, weak in body, weak in will—can she rule, with all the frailty of her sex?

I aim to make the fiction flexible so that it bends itself around the facts as we have them. Otherwise I don't see the point. Nobody seems to understand that. Nobody seems to share my approach to historical fiction. I suppose if I have a maxim, it is that there isn't any necessary conflict between good history and good drama.

Slicing the cranium of her husband, the Marquis of Exeter, and stirring a forefinger in the murk of his intentions.

The moment is fleeting. But insight cannot be taken back. You cannot return to the moment you were in before.

For a young reader that's an important moment, when you recognize that your self exists in the world and that your self exists in literature.