Quotes from Hilary Mantel

But what's the point? he thinks. She would die and leave me. Or I would die and leave her. It's not worth it. Nobody's worth it.

He feels a moment of jealously towards the dead, to those who served kings in slower times than these, nowadays the products of some bought or poisoned brain can be disseminated through Europe in a month

It was just that I was unsuited to being a child.

The door was flung open. Maurice Duplay filled it; energetic master, shirt- sleeves rolled up. He threw out his arms, the good Jacobin Duplay, and formed a sentence totally original, something which had never been uttered in the history of the world: "Camille, you have a son, and your wife is very well, and is asking you to be at home, right now.

It shows how unaccountable men are, what they harbour in their souls: which by no means shows on their faces.

Policy is the servant of reason. It is a sort of blasphemy to make human reason contradict itself and advise in the name of policy what it forbids in the name of morality.

Death is your prince

Ask Robespierre. Ask the man with the conscience which is more important, your friend or your country— ask him how he weighs an individual in the scheme of things. Ask him which comes first, his old pals or his new principles. You ask him, Camille.

When it was time to write, and he took his pen in his hand, he never thought of consequences; he thought of style. I wonder why I ever bothered with sex, he thought; there's nothing in this breathing world so gratifying as an artfully placed semicolon.

Full bellies breed gentle manners. The pinch of famine makes monsters. . .

Old courtiers have resigned, rather than serve Anne; the new comptroller of the household is Sir William Paulet

It is a characteristic of Henry, to run before you to where you were not quite going.

pikemen were too poor for mail. We went in boiled leather which we hardened by prayer. We wore other men's boots.

Why would you want the damned fetched back from Hell? There's a reason God put them where they are.

He has always done what was needed to survive, and if his judgement of what was necessary was sometimes questionable. . . that is what it is to be young.

appurtenances

He has noticed this: that men who have not met him dislike him, but when they have met him, only some of them do.

What kind of persons writes fiction about the past?" - "The kind of person for whom one lifetime is not enough." - Hilary Mantel

He doesn't believe the dead need our prayers, nor can they use them. But anyone who know the Bible as he does, knows that our God is a capricious God, and there's no harm in hedging your bets.

Imagination only comes when you privilege the subconscious, when you make delay and procrastination work for you.

The Commons. God rot them. ... They never think higher than their pockets.

This may interest you. A letter from my dear cousin Fouquier-Tinville." Camille cast an eye over his relative's best handwriting. "Squirm, flattery, abasement, squirm, dearest sweetest Camille, squirm squirm squirm … 'the election of the Patriot Ministers … I know them all by reputation, but I am not so happy as to be known by them—

It was only a year before his girls died of the same cause.

The Cornish people petition to have their saints back – those downgraded in recent rulings. Without their regular feasts, the faithful are unstrung from the calendar, awash in a sea of days that are all the same.