Quotes from Hilary Mantel

There are no endings. If you think so you are deceived as to their nature. They are all beginnings. Here is one.

He feared, in his secret heart, that one day in company the baby would sit up and speak; that it would engage his eyes, appraise him, and say, 'You prick.

this is what death does to you, it takes and takes, so that all that is left of your memories is a faint tracing of spilled ash.

He saw that it was the gaps that were important, the spaces between the threads which made the pattern, and not the threads themselves.

Now, sensing that he has less than a week to live, he must pick up his images from where he has left them, walking his own inner terrain. . . He must traverse his whole life, waking and sleeping: you cannot leave your memories alone in this world, for other men to own.

His speech is low and rapid, his manner assured; he is at home in courtroom or waterfront, bishop's palace or inn yard. He can draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house and fix a jury. He will quote you a nice point in the old authors, from Plato to Plautus and back again. He knows new poetry, and can say it in Italian. He works all hours, first up and last to bed. He makes money and he spends it. He will take a bet on anything.

This was an idea peculiar to Camille, Maximilien thought, that the worse things get, the better they get. No one else seems to think this way.

In England there is no mercy for the poor. You pay for everything, even a broken neck." 472

is a prince even human? If you add him up, does the total make a man? He is made of shards and broken fragments of the past, of prophecies and of the dreams of his ancestral line. The tides of history break inside him, their current threatens to carry him away. His blood is not his own, but ancient blood.

Robespierre has never forgiven his friends the injuries he has done them, nor the kindnesses he has received from them, nor the talents some of them possess that he doesn't.

This revolution - will it be a living?' 'We must hope so. Look, I have to go, I'm visiting a client. He's going to be hanged tomorrow.' 'Is that usual?' 'Oh, they always hang my clients. Even in property and matrimonial cases.

92, '93, '94. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity or Death.

Feminism hasn't failed, it's just never been tried.

Why does everything you know, and everything you've learned, confirm you in what you believed before? Whereas in my case, what I grew up with, and what I thought I believed, is chipped away a little and a little, a fragment then a piece and then a piece more. With every month that passes, the corners are knocked off the certainties of this world: and the next world too.

My lord, what do you call a whore when she is a knight's daughter?" "Ah," the cardinal says, entering into the problem. "To her face, 'my lady.

It is a sure sign of troubled minds, the habit of quotation.

DANTON: Could you indeed? It's you idealists who make the best tyrants. ROBESPIERRE: It seems a bit late to be having this conversation. I've had to take up violence now, and so much else. We should have discussed it last year.

Possibly it's something women do: spend time imagining what it's like to be each other. One can learn from that, he thinks.

Damn it all, Cromwell, why are you such a . . . person? It isn't as if you could afford to be.

Have you ever observed that when a man gets a son he takes all the credit, and when he gets a daughter he blames his wife? And if they do not breed at all, we say it is because her womb is barren. We do not say it is because his seed is bad.

It is not easy to talk about a condition once dismissed as 'the career women's disease'. But women will continue to suffer until we realise the cost of ignoring it

God knows our hearts. There is no need for an idle formula or an intermediary. No need for language either: God is beyond translation.

Account books form a narrative as engaging as any tale of sea monsters or cannibals.

Slow down,' he said, 'so I can see how you do it,' but she'd laughed and said, 'I can't slow down, if I stopped to think how I was doing it I couldn't do it at all.