571 Quotes by Hilary Mantel

He admires these speculative worlds, that grow up in the crevices between truths.

At Smithfield Frith is being shoveled up, his youth, his grace, his learning and his beauty: a compaction of mud, grease, charred bone.

If I am truthful,’ Norfolk says, ‘I never know what we are meant to talk to women about. They don’t like anything a man likes.

Henry likes to utter his sin and be forgiven. He is sincerely sorry, he will not do it again. And in this case, perhaps he will not. The temptation to cut off your wife’s head does not arise every year.

The days of the moneylender have arrived, and the days of the swaggering privateer; banker sits down with banker, and kings are their waiting boys.

These are good days for him: every day a fight he can win. “Still serving your Hebrew God, I see,” remarks Sir Thomas More. “I mean, your idol Usury.” But when More, a scholar revered through Europe, wakes up in Chelsea to the prospect of morning prayers in Latin, he wakes up to a creator who speaks the swift patois of the markets; when More is settling in for a session of self-scourging, he and Rafe are sprinting to Lombard Street to get the day’s exchange rates.

When you have committed enough words to paper, you feel you have a spine stiff enough to stand up in the wind. But when you stop writing, you find that’s all you are – a spine, a row of rattling vertebrae, dried out like an old quill pen.

Life is not like detective stories. There is a wider scope for interpretation. The answers to all the questions that beset you are not in facts, which are the greatest illusion of all, but in your own heart, in your own habits, in your limitations, in your fear.

High spirits are a foolish waste in those destined for the chain gang of marriage and the mill.