99+ Hilary Mantel Quotes on Books, Facts and Distraction - Quotes.pub

Here you will find all the famous Hilary Mantel quotes. There are more than 99+ quotes in our Hilary Mantel quotes collection. We have collected all of them and made stunning Hilary Mantel wallpapers & posters out of those quotes. You can use this wallpapers & posters on mobile, desktop, print and frame them or share them on the various social media platforms. You can download the quotes images in various different sizes for free. In the below list you can find quotes in various categories like Books, Facts and Distraction

Busyness, I feel increasingly, is the writer’s curse and downfall. You read too much and write too readily, you become cut off from your inner life, from the flow of your own thoughts, and turned far too much towards the outside world.

History offers us vicarious experience. It allows the youngest student to possess the ground equally with his elders; without a knowledge of history to give him a context for present events, he is at the mercy of every social misdiagnosis handed to him.

But if you cannot speak truth at a beheading, when can you speak it?

As I am a woman, I am the means by which sin enters this world. I am the devil’s gateway, the cursed ingress. I am the means by which Satan attacks the man, whom he was not bold enough to attack, except through me. Well, that is their view of the situation. My view is that there are too many priests with scant learning and smaller occupation. And I wish the Pope and the Emperor and all Spaniards were in the sea and drowned.

The word ‘however’ is like an imp coiled beneath your chair. It induces ink to form words you have not yet seen, and lines to march across the page and overshoot the margin. There are no endings. If you think so you are deceived as to their nature. They are all beginnings. Here is one.

When I was thin, I had no notion of what being fat is like. When I worked in a department store, I had sold clothes to women of most sizes, so I should have known; but perhaps you have to experience the state from the inside, to understand what fat is like.

It is not as if it is tales out of Boccaccio.′ She laughs. ‘They could tell Boccaccio a tale, those sinners at Wolf Hall.

God takes out your heart of flesh, and gives you a heart of stone.

What is a woman’s life? Do not think, because she is not a man, she does not fight. The bedchamber is her tilting ground, where she shows her colours, and her theatre of war is the sealed room where she gives birth.

History is not the past – it is the method we have evolved of organising our ignorance of the past.

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

We are all dying, just at different speeds.

Like every writer, I’m drawn by unlikely juxtapositions, precisely-dated and once-only collisions between people from different worlds.

He had meant to write to Gregory and say, I have seen such a sweet girl, I will find out who she is and, if I steer our family adroitly in the next few years, perhaps you can marry her. He has not written this. In his present precarious situation, it would be about as useful as the letters Gregory used to write to him: Dear father, I hope you are well. I hope your dog is well. And now no more for lack of time.

I think I would have been a reasonably good lawyer. I have a faculty for making sense of mountains of information.

I am usually protective of my work, not showing it to anyone until it has been redrafted and polished.

I used to think that when I set out that doing the research was enough! But then the gaps would emerge that could only be filled by the imagination. And imagination only comes when you privilege the subconscious, when you make delay and procrastination work for you.

Beneath every history, another history.

At New Year’s he had given Anne a present of silver forks with handles of rock crystal. He hopes she will use them to eat with, not to stick in people.

I’m one of these children who grew up at the knee of my grandmother and her elder sister, listening to very old people talk about their memories.

Once you’re labeled as mentally ill, and that’s in your medical notes, then anything you say can be discounted as an artefact of your mental illness.

Write a book you’d like to read. If you wouldn’t read it, why would anybody else? Don’t write for a perceived audience or market. It may well have vanished by the time your book’s ready.

A novel should be a book of questions, not a book of answers.

If you have a good story idea, don’t assume it must form a prose narrative. It may work better as a play, a screenplay or a poem. Be flexible.

Like a historian, I interpret, select, discard, shape, simplify. Unlike a historian, I make up people’s thoughts.

For myself, the only way I know how to make a book is to construct it like a collage: a bit of dialogue here, a scrap of narrative, an isolated description of a common object, an elaborate running metaphor which threads between the sequences and holds different narrative lines together.

You don’t get on by being original. You don’t get on by being bright. You don’t get on by being strong. You get on by being a subtle crook.

For what’s the point of breeding children, if each generation does not improve on what went before.

By the tits of Holy Agnes.

History is a set of skills rather than a narrative.

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.

Over the city lies the sweet, rotting odor of yesterday’s unrecollected sins.

But an experienced reader is also a self-aware and critical reader. I can’t remember ever reading a story without judging it.

You’re only young once, they say, but doesn’t it go on for a long time? More years than you can bear.

Insight cannot be taken back. You cannot return to the moment you were in before.

In my 20s I was in constant pain from undiagnosed endometriosis. With no prospect of a cure, I decided I needed a career – writing – that could accommodate being ill.

History is always changing behind us, and the past changes a little every time we retell it.

Once paper and ink were to hand, it was useless to appeal to his better nature, to tell him he was wrecking reputations and ruining people's lives. A kind of sweet venom flowed through his veins, smoother than the finest cognac, quicker to make the head spin. And, just as some people crave opium, he craves the opportunity to exercise his fine art of mockery, vituperation and a buss; laudanum might quieten the senses, but a good editorial puts a catching the throat and a skip in the heartbeat. Writing's like running downhill; can't stop if you want to.

A Place of Greater Safety Quotes

Thomas More, the Lord Chancellor, has put his signature first on all the articles against Wolsey. They say one strange allegation has been added at his behest. The cardinal is accused of whispering in the king’s ear and breathing into his face; since the cardinal has the French pox, he intended to infect our monarch. When he hears this he thinks, imagine living inside the Lord Chancellor’s head. Imagine writing down such a charge and taking it to the printer, and circulating it through the court and through the realm, putting it out there to where people will believe anything; putting it out there, to the shepherds on the hills, to Tyndale’s plowboy, to the beggar on the roads and the patient beast in its byre or stall; out there to the bitter winter winds, and to the weak early sun, and the snowdrops in the London gardens.

Wolf Hall Quotes

…they were intent on framing a 'Declaration of the Rights of Man'. Some were heard to mutter that the Assembly should write the constitution first, since rights exist in virtue of laws, but jurisprudence is such a dull subject, and liberty so exciting.

A Place of Greater Safety Quotes

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.

Absence Quotes Mystery Quotes Politics Quotes Power Quotes

Be reasonable, my lord. Once you.ve done it, you'll want to do it all the time. For about three years. That's the way it goes. And your father has other work in mind for you.pg.480

Duke of richmond Quotes Henry VIII Quotes Thomas cromwell Quotes Wolf Hall Quotes

But what do they get by the change? One dog sated with meat is replaced by a hungrier dog who bites nearer the bone. Out goes the man grown fat with honor, and in comes a hungry and a lean man.

1529 Quotes Ch visitation Quotes Wolf Hall Quotes

Gambling is not a vice, if you can afford to do it.

Wolf Hall Quotes

Death is your prince, you are not his patron; when you think he is engaged elsewhere, he will batter down your door, walk in and wipe his boots on you.

Bring Up the Bodies Quotes

And they say [money's] the root of all evil. Well, Protestants say that. Catholics know better.

Fludd Quotes

In his student days he was known for a sharp slanderous tongue, for irreverance to his seniors, for drinking and gaming for high stakes. But who would hold up his head, if people judged us by what we were like at twenty?

Wolf Hall Quotes

Christ died to free us from the burden of our sin, but he never, so far as [Sister Philomena:] could see, lifted a finger to free us from our stupidity

Fludd Quotes

He would have thought God could make his own decisions, but Weston believes the creator may be pushed and coaxed and maybe bribed a little.

Bring Up the Bodies Quotes Humour Quotes

A sea-green sky: lamps blossoming white. This is marginal land: fields of strung wire, of treadless tyres in ditches, fridges dead on their backs, and starving ponies cropping the mud. It is a landscape running with outcasts and escapees, with Afghans, Turks and Kurds: with scapegoats, scarred with bottle and burn marks, limping from the cities with broken ribs. The life forms here are rejects, or anomalies: the cats tipped from speeding cars, and the Heathrow sheep, their fleece clotted with the stench of aviation fuel.

Beyond Black Quotes Setting Quotes Sheep Quotes

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