571 Quotes by Hilary Mantel

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

Those who think a heart cannot break have led blessed and sheltered lives.

You can persuade the quick to think again, but you cannot remake your reputation with the dead.

You don't get on by being original. You don't get on by being bright. You don't get on by being strong. You get on by being a subtle crook.

But what do they get by the change? One dog sated with meat is replaced by a hungrier dog who bites nearer the bone. Out goes the man grown fat with honor, and in comes a hungry and a lean man.

I only became a novelist because I thought I had missed my chance to become a historian.

God takes out your heart of flesh, and gives you a heart of stone.

'Wolf Hall' attempts to duplicate not the historian's chronology but the way memory works: in leaps, loops, flashes.

Cravats grow higher, as if they mean to protect the throat. The highest cravats in public life will be worn by Citizen Antoine Saint-Just, of the National Convention and the Committee of Public Safety. In the dark and harrowing days of '94, an obscene feminine inversion will appear: a thin crimson ribbon, worn round a bare white neck.