571 Quotes by Hilary Mantel

He is tired out from the effort of deciphering the world. Tired from the effort of smiling at the foe.

Florence and Milan had given him ideas more flexible than those of people who’d stayed at home.

He did not relish the topic; he sensed in Jane Rochford’s tone the peculiar cruelty of women. They fight with the poor weapons God has bestowed – spite, guile, skill in deceit – and it is likely that in conversations between themselves they trespass in places where a man would never trust his footing.

We are vain and ambitious all the same, and we never do live quiet, because we rise in the morning and we feel the blood coursing in our veins and we think, by the Holy Trinity, whose head can I stamp on today? What worlds are at hand, for me to conquer? Or at the least we think, if God made me a crewman on his ship of fools, how can I murder the drunken captain, and steer it to port and not be wrecked?

There is a pause, while she turns the great pages of her volume of rage, and puts her finger on just the right word.

It’s not easy to speak of nonexistence, even if you’ve already commissioned your tomb.

But it is no use to justify yourself. It is no good to explain. It is weak to be anecdotal. It is wise to conceal the past even if there is nothing to conceal. 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 that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.

This is what life does for you in the end; it arranges a fight you can’t win.

It’s always the wrong bits of the past people want back.