Quotes from Hilary Mantel

But the law is not an instrument to find out truth. It is there to create a fiction that will help us move past atrocious act and face our future. It seems there is no mercy in this world, but a kind of haphazard justice: men pay for crimes, but not necessarily their own.

She lives on the fumes of whiskey and the iron in the blood of her prey.

there is an art to being in a hurry but not showing it." 390

It is not the stars that make us, Dr. Butts, it is circumstance and necessita , the choices we make under pressure; our virtues make us, but virtues are not enough, we must deploy our vices at times. Or don't you agree?

Our virtues make us; but virtues are not enough, we must deploy our vices at times.

But who would hold up his head, if people judged us by what we were like at twenty?" 398

A statute is written to entrap meaning, a poem to escape it.

He wonders again if the dead need translators; perhaps in a moment, in a simple twist of unbecoming, they know everything they need to know.

What can you do but, as Cicero says, live hopefully, die bravely?

But I had to think to myself that this was normal, because that was the attitude. I was 19 when I went to see my doctor and I was told it was all in the mind. [Author Hilary Mantel on being told her endometriosis was imagined pain, From Oct 2009 Daily Mail interview]

Your love of glory must conquer your will to survive; or why fight at all? Why not be a smith, a brewer, a wool merchant? Why are you in the contest, if not to win, and if not to win, then to die?

The maid found a handkerchief of hers, under the bed in which she had died. A ring that had been missing turned up in his own writing desk. A tradesman arrived with fabric she had ordered three weeks ago. Each day, some further evidence of a task half finished, a scheme incomplete. He found a novel, with her place marked. And this is it.

an elegant woman, with a refinement that makes mere prettiness seem redundant.

You mustn't stand about. Come home with me to dinner.' 'No.' More shakes his head. 'I would rather be blown around on the river and go home hungry. If I could trust you only to put food in my mouth – but you will put words into it.

He never lives in a single reality, but in a shifting shadow-mesh of diplomatic possibilities.

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 who went before?

As Danton sees it, the most bizarre aspect of Camille's character is his desire to scribble over every blank surface; he sees a guileless piece of paper, virgin and harmless, and persecutes it till it is black with words, and then besmirches its sister, and so on, through the quire.

Everybody wants something, if only for the pain to stop.

It's the living that turn and chase the dead. The long bones and skulls are tumbled from their shrouds, and words like stones thrust into their rattling mouths: we edit their writings, we rewrite their lives.

I picked up a snake once. In Italy." "Why did you do that?" "For a bet." "Was it poisonous?" "We didn't know. That was the point of the bet." "Did it bite you?" "Of course." "Why of course?" "It wouldn't be much of a story, would it? If I'd put it down unharmed, and away it slid?

There are some people in this world who like everything squared up and precise, and there are those who will allow some drift at the margins.

Oh, by the thrice-beshitten shroud of Lazarus!

If a man spoke to you in that tone, you'd invite him to step outside and ask someone to hold your coat." 378

Edward Seymour says, 'You should have been a bishop, Cromwell.' 'Edward,' he says, 'I should have been Pope.