571 Quotes by Hilary Mantel

The world moves on so fast, and we lose all chance of being the women our mothers were; we lose all understanding of what shaped them.

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

Thomas More syas that the imperial troops, for their enjoyment, are roasting live babies on spits. Oh, he would! says Thomas Cromwell. Listen, soldiers don't do that. They're too busy carrying away everything they can turn into ready money.

Without their regular feasts, the faithful are unstrung from the calendar, awash in a sea of days that are all the same.

Vadier (on Danton): “We’ll clean up the rest of them, and leave that great stuffed turbot till the end.”Danton (on Vadier): “Vadier? I’ll eat his brains and use his skull to shit in.

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.

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

Concentrate on sharpening your memory and peeling your sensibility. Cut every page you write by at least one third. Stop constructing those piffling little similes of yours. Work out what it is you want to say. Then say it in the most direct and vigorous way you can. Eat meat. Drink blook. Give up your social life and don't think you can have friends. Rise in the quiet hours of the night and prick your fingertips and use the blood for ink; that will cure you of persiflage!

I truly believe I should be a better man if the weather were better.