571 Quotes by Hilary Mantel

A printing press that can write its own books? A mind that thinks about itself? If I don’t have it, at least the King of France doesn’t either.

A man’s power is in the half-light, in the half-seen movements of his hand and the unguessed-at expression of his face. It is the absence of facts tat frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.

Which of these Thomases saw the blow coming? There are moments when a memory moves right through you.

I felt a wish to be fictionalized.

History is not the past – it is the method we have evolved to organize our ignorance of the past. It is the record of what’s left on the record... It is no more ‘the past’ than a birth certificate is a birth, or a script is a performance, or a map is a journey.

I am always translating, he thinks: if not language to language, then person to person.

And I thought I would win him, I really thought I would, for he was tenacious of the world, tenacious of his person, and had a good deal to live for. In the end he was his own murderer. He wrote and wrote and he talked and talked, then suddenly at a stroke he cancelled himself. If ever a man came close to beheading himself, Thomas More was that man.

But the law is not an instrument to find out truth. It is there to create a fiction that will help us move past atrocious acts and face our future.

What does St. Paul mean when he says Jesus was made a little lower than the angels?