571 Quotes by Hilary Mantel

Fiction leaves us so much work to do, allows the individual so much input; you have to see, you have to hear, you have to taste the madeleine, and while you are seemingly passive in your chair, you have to travel.

[H]ope takes you by the throat like a stranger, it makes your heart leap...

If you skew the endocrine system, you lose the pathways to self. When endocrine patterns change, it alters the way you think and feel. One shift in the pattern tends to trip another.

For historians, creative writers provide a kind of pornography.

I'm one of these children who grew up at the knee of my grandmother and her elder sister, listening to very old people talk about their memories.

History offers us vicarious experience. It allows the youngest student to possess the ground equally with his elders; without a knowledge of history to give him a context for present events, he is at the mercy of every social misdiagnosis handed to him.

Why are we so attached to the severities of the past? Why are we so proud of having endured our fathers and our mothers, the fireless days and the meatless days, the cold winters and the sharp tongues? It's not as if we had a choice.

You're only young once, they say, but doesn't it go on for a long time? More years than you can bear.

But an experienced reader is also a self-aware and critical reader. I can't remember ever reading a story without judging it.