571 Quotes by Hilary Mantel

If you marvel at your good fortune, you should marvel in secret: never let people see you.

Each action contains its opposite. Each action contains the shadow-trace of the choice not made, the seeds of infinite variation. Each choice, once made, trips contingencies, alternatives; each choice breeds its own universe.

There are some people in this world who like everything squared up and precise, and there are those who will allow some drift at the margins.

When the cardinal came to a closed door he would flatter it – oh beautiful yielding door! Then he would try tricking it open. And you are just the same, just the same.” He pours himself some of the duke’s present. “But in the last resort, you just kick it in.

Let me unfold to you,” he says, “the way my thoughts proceed.

Feminism hasn’t failed, it’s just never been tried.

It is prince’s tricks,’ he says. ‘Three days in a row Henry gives the French a private audience. Then he ignores them for a week.

Render me the texture of flesh. Pick me what it is, in the timbre of the voice, that marks out the living from the dead.

What can you do but, as Cicero says, live hopefully, die bravely?