571 Quotes by Hilary Mantel

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

Rafe shrugs. ‘He is frightened of you, sir. You have outgrown him. You have gone beyond what any servant or subject should be.’ It is the cardinal over again, he thinks. Wolsey was broken not for his failures, but for his successes; not for any error, but for grievances stored up, about how great he had become.

Would they quarrel so much, if they were indifferent?

In truth you cannot separate them, your public being and your private self.

It is a sure sign of troubled minds, the habit of quotation.

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

Leases, writes, statutes, all are written to be read and each person reads them by the light of self-interest.

But our secrets do not keep us. They worry at us; they wear us away, from the inside out.

What is a woman’s life? Do not think, because she is not a man, she does not fight. The bedchamber is her tilting ground, where she shows her colours, and her theatre of war is the sealed room where she gives birth.