571 Quotes by Hilary Mantel

Truth isn’t pretty, I thought, and the pursuit of it doesn’t make pretty people. Truth isn’t elegant; that’s just mathematicians’ sentimentality. Truth is squalid and full of blots, and you can only find it in the accumulation of dusty and broken facts, in the cellars and sewers of the human mind.

There’s nothing in this breathing world so gratifying as an artfully placed semicolon.

I have noticed,’ she says, ’common men often love their mothers. Sometimes they even love their wives.

Writing’s like running downhill; can’t stop if you want to.

I wonder what I’ve married into,” Morgan Williams says. But really, this is just something Morgan says; some men have a habitual sniffle, some women have a headache, and Morgan has this wonder.

He has never told anyone this story. He doesn’t mind talking to Richard, to Rafe about his past – within reason – but he doesn’t mean to give away pieces of himself.

It is St. Catherine’s Day: in honor of the saint who was threatened with martyrdom on a wheel, we all walk in circles to our destination. At least, that’s the theory. He has never seen anyone over the age of twelve actually doing it.

The dead wander the lanes of the next life like strangers lost in Venice.

Nobody knows how long the arrests wil go on and who else will be taken. He feels even he does not know, and he is in charge of it.