Quotes from Hilary Mantel

We are always dying – I while I write, you while you read, and others while they listen or block their ears; they are all dying.

Ireland is quiet this Christmas, in greater peace than she has seen for forty years. Mainly he has brought this about by hanging people. Not many: just the right ones. It's an art, a necessary art. . .

istoria nu este trecutul, ci ceea ce r?mâne în ciur dup? ce veacurile au trecut prin el

Once you're labeled as mentally ill, and that's in your medical notes, then anything you say can be discounted as an artifact of your mental illness.

She asked me once. I failed her. If she asked me again, I would fail her again.

The child Elizabeth is wrapped tightly in layers, her fists hidden: just as well, she looks as if she would strike you. Ginger bristles poke from beneath her cap, and her eyes are vigilant; he has never seen an infant in the crib look so ready to take offense. Lady Bryan says, "Do you think she looks like the king?" He hesitates, trying to be fair to both parties. "As much as a little maid ought.

But we yearn for our origins; we yearn for an innocent terrain.

I gave up fighting because, when I lived in Florence, I looked at frescoes every day

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

Venice had cured him of any nostalgia for the banks of the Thames.

If another man were saying this, he'd be trying to start a fight. When Thomas More says it, it leads to an invitation to dinner.

how about not fighting any? Negotiate, my lord. It's cheaper

I can remember the days,' Mirabeau said, 'when we didn't have public opinion. No one had ever heard of such a thing.

Henry is a man of great endowments, lacking only consistency, reason and sense.

You wonder what else you have always believed, believed without foundation.

Why is it always little legs that have to save big legs? Just run upstairs and fetch me ....... It flattered you, when you were young. You thought you were important, indeed essential. He used to hurtle around Putney, on errands for Walter. More fool him.

man of great endowments, lacking only consistency, reason and sense.

As the combatants will always tell you, you really needed to see it, you had to be there. . .

The page of an accounts book is there for your use, like a love poem. It's not there for you to nod and then dismiss it; it's there to open your heart to possibility. Love your neighbor. Study the market. Increase the spread of benevolence. Bring in better figures next year.

The dead watch us, zealous in old causes.

The world is run from Antwerp, from Florence, from places he has never imagined; from Lisbon, from where the ships with sails of silk drift west and are burned up in the sun. Not from castle walls, but from countinghouses, not by the call of the bugle but by the click of the abacus, not by the grate and click of the mechanism of the gun but by the scrape of the pen on the page of the promissory note that pays for the gun and the gunsmith and the powder and shot.

He feels someone has attached a weight to his heart. Not a big weight: just a small leaden bob, so he feels the drag.

It was too much for the Commons to digest, that rich men might have some duty to the poor.

With the words arrives the truth of them.