571 Quotes by Hilary Mantel

Queen Katherine, whose boys have all died, takes it patiently: that is to say, she suffers.

Once he had watched Liz making a silk braid. One end was pinned to the wall and on each finger of her raised hands she was spinning loops of thread, her fingers flying so fast he couldn’t see how it worked. ‘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.

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?

In order not to make a liar out of Henry or Katherine, one or the other, the committee men think up circumstances in which the match may have been partly consummated, or somewhat consummated, and to do this they have to imagine every disaster and shame that can occur between a man and a woman alone in a room in the dark.

Rouge, also, had a peculiar function as caste-mark. It was applied with a heavy hand and in a circular pattern. It was worn most lavishly on the day of a woman’s debut, when she was obliged to simulate the flush of the contrived orgasm bestowed by royal favour.

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

If you cannot speak truth at a beheading, when can you speak it?

You start out, you start talking, you don’t even know what you’re going to say. You don’t even know your way to the end of the sentence. You don’t know anything. Then suddenly you do know you have to walk blind and you walk slap into the truth.

He makes a gesture, designed to impersonate frankness.