571 Quotes by Hilary Mantel

Over the city lies the sweet, rotting odor of yesterday's unrecollected sins.

Not prayer nor Bible verse, nor scholarship nor wit, nor grant under seal nor statute law can alter the fact of villain blood. Not all his craft and guile can make him a Howard, or a Cheney, or a Fitzwilliam, a Stanley or even a Seymour: not even in an emergency.

I think, if you're going to kill a man, do it. Don't write him a letter about it. Don't bluster and threaten and put him on his guard.

Mirabeau: “If you have been told to clear us from this hall, you must ask for orders to use force. We shall leave our seats only at bayonet point. The King can cause us to be killed; tell him we all await death; but he need not hope that we shall separate until we have made the constitution.”Audible only to his neighbor, he adds, “If they come, we bugger off, quick.

I was (an am) unsure about how I am related to my old self, or to myself from year to year. The hormonal profile of an individual determines much of the manifest personality. If you skew the endocrine system,you loose the pathways to the self. When endocrine patterns change it alters the way you think and feel. One shift in the pattern tends to trip another.

Wherever he goes he is cheered by the people.’ ‘The people?’ Norfolk says. ‘They'd cheer a Barbary ape. Who cares what they cheer? Hang 'em all.’‘But then who will you tax?’ he says.

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

Camille, a few feet away, looked like a gypsy who had mislaid his violin and had been searching for it in a hedgerow; he frustrated daily the best efforts of an expensive tailor, wearing his clothes as a subtle comment on the collapsing social order.

And Louis is weak. Let him give an inch, and some Cromwell will appear.