by ·

Hilary Mantel Quotes | Quotes said by Hilary Mantel

  • Hilary Mantel Quote #1

    ... every monarch needs a blow on the head, from time to time.

  • Hilary Mantel Quote #2

    ... those sectaries in Europe who are always expecting the end of the world, but who hope that, after the earth has been consumed by fire, they will be seated in glory: grilled a little, crisp at the edges and blackened in parts, but still, thanks be to God, alive for eternity, and seated at his right hand.

  • Hilary Mantel Quote #3

    ...this is what death does to you, it takes and takes, so that all that is left of your memories is a faint tracing of spilled ash.

  • Hilary Mantel Quote #4

    1776: A declaration of the Parlement of Paris:
    The first rule of justice is to conserve for each individual that which belongs to him. This is a fundamental rule of natural law, human rights and civil government; a rule which consists not only in maintaining the rights of property, but also those rights vested in the individual and derived from prerogatives of birth and social position.

  • Hilary Mantel Quote #5

    A lie is no less a lie because it is a thousand years old. Your undivided church has liked nothing better than persecuting its own members, burning them and hacking them apart when they stood by their own conscience, slashing their bellies open and feeding their guts to dogs.

  • Hilary Mantel Quote #6

    Abroad? Oh no. I went to England in ’91, and you stood in the garden at Fontenay and berated me.” He shook his head. “This is my nation. Here I stay. A man can’t carry his country on the soles of his shoes.

  • Hilary Mantel Quote #7

    All that evening he talked to the Candle of Arras, in a low confidential tone. When you get down to it, he thought, there's not much difference between politics and sex; it's all about
    power. He didn't suppose he was the first person in the world to make this observation. It's a question of seduction, and how fast and cheap you can effect it: if Camille, he thought, approximates to one of those little milliners who can't make ends meet - in other words, an absolute pushover - then Robespierre is a Carmelite, mind set on becoming Mother Superior. You can't corrupt her; you can wave your cock under her nose, and she's neither shocked nor interested: why should she be, when she hasn't the remotest idea
    what it's for?

  • Hilary Mantel Quote #8

    And if a diversion is needed, why not arrest a general? Arthur Dillon is a friend of eminent deputies, a contender for the post of Commander-in-Chief of the Northern Front; he has proved himself at Valmy and in a halfdozen actions since. In the National Assembly he was a liberal; now he is a republican. Isn’t it then logical that he should be thrown into gaol, July 1, on suspicion of passing military secrets to the enemy?

  • Hilary Mantel Quote #9

    As Danton sees it, the most bizarre aspect of Camille's character is his desire to scribble over every blank surface; he sees a guileless piece of paper, virgin and harmless, and persecutes it till it is black with words, and then besmirches its sister, and so on, through the quire.

  • Hilary Mantel Quote #10

    As More says, it hardly makes a man a hero, to agree to stand and burn once he is chained to a stake. I have written books and I cannot unwrite them. I cannot unbelieve what I believe. I cannot unlive my life. pg.404

  • Hilary Mantel Quote #11

    As the year goes on, certain deputies—and others, high in public life—will appear unshaven, without coat or cravat; or they will jettison these marks of the polite man, when the temperature rises. They affect the style of men who begin their mornings with a splash under a backyard pump, and who stop off at their street-corner bar for a nip of spirits on their way to ten hours’ manual labor. Citizen Robespierre, however, is a breathing rebuke
    to these men; he retains his buckled shoes, his striped coat of olive green. Can it be the same coat that he wore in the first year of the Revolution? He is not profligate with coats.

    While Citizen Danton tears off the starched linen that fretted his thick neck, Citizen Saint-Just’s cravat grows ever higher, stiffer, more wonderful to behold. He affects a single earring, but he resembles less a corsair than a slightly deranged merchant banker.

  • Hilary Mantel Quote #12

    But I had to think to myself that this was normal, because that was the attitude. I was 19 when I went to see my doctor and I was told it was all in the mind.

    [Author Hilary Mantel on being told her endometriosis was imagined pain, From Oct 2009 Daily Mail interview]

  • Hilary Mantel Quote #13

    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.

  • Hilary Mantel Quote #14

    But you see, Crumb, it is hard to give up what you have worked at since you were a boy. There were some Italian visitors once, they were cheering us on, Brandon and myself, and they thought that Achilles and Hector had come back to life. So they said.'
    But which is which? One dragged through the dust by the other ...
    The king says, 'You turn your boy out beautifully. No nobleman could do more.'
    'I don't want him to be Achilles,' he says, 'I only want him not to be flattened.

  • Hilary Mantel Quote #15

    By the hairy balls of Jesus

  • Hilary Mantel Quote #16

    Camille, a few feet away, looked like a gypsy who had mislaid his violin and had been searching for it in a hedgerow; he frustrated daily the best efforts of an expensive tailor, wearing his clothes as a subtle comment on the collapsing social order.

  • Hilary Mantel Quote #17

    Cardinal Campeggio has implored Katherine to bow to the king's will, accept that her marriage is invalid and retire to a convent. Certainly, she says sweetly, she will become a nun: if the king will become a monk.

  • Hilary Mantel Quote #18

    Concentrate on sharpening your memory and peeling your sensibility. Cut every page you write by at least one third. Stop constructing those piffling little similes of yours. Work out what it is you want to say. Then say it in the most direct and vigorous way you can. Eat meat. Drink blook. Give up your social life and don't think you can have friends. Rise in the quiet hours of the night and prick your fingertips and use the blood for ink; that will cure you of persiflage!

  • Hilary Mantel Quote #19

    Cravats grow higher, as if they mean to protect the throat. The highest cravats in public life will be worn by Citizen Antoine Saint-Just, of the National Convention and the Committee of Public Safety. In the dark and harrowing days of ’94, an obscene feminine inversion will appear: a thin crimson ribbon, worn round a bare white neck.

  • Hilary Mantel Quote #20

    Do you look like the photograph on your book jackets? Authors, I find, seldom do.

  • Hilary Mantel Quote #21

    Every time you go to see Hamlet you don't expect it to have a happy ending...you're still enthralled.
    (Interview BBC Radio 4 Today 17 October 2012.)

  • Hilary Mantel Quote #22

    Fabre looked up, his mobile face composed. Good-bye, he said. Georges-Jacques--study law. Law is a weapon.

  • Hilary Mantel Quote #23

    Fabre stood up. He placed his fingertips on d‘Anton’s temples. “Put your fingers here,” he said. “Feel the resonance. Put them here, and here.” He jabbed at d’Anton’s face: below the cheekbones, at the side of his jaw. “I’ll teach you like an actor,” he said. “This city is our stage.”
    Camille said: “Book of Ezekiel. ‘This city is the cauldron, and we the flesh’ ...”
    Fabre turned. “This stutter,” he said. “You don’t have to do it.” Camille put his hands over his eyes. “Leave me alone,” he said. “Even you.” Fabre’s face was incandescent. “Even you, I am going to teach.” He leapt forward, wrenched Camille upright in his chair. He took him by the shoulders and shook him. “You’re going to talk properly,” Fabre said. “Even if it kills one of us.” Camille put his hands protectively over his head. Fabre continued to perpetrate violence; d’Anton was too tired to intervene.

  • Hilary Mantel Quote #24

    Fantasy is unconstrained by truth.

  • Hilary Mantel Quote #25

    Feminism hasn't failed, it's just never been tried.

  • Hilary Mantel Quote #26

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

  • Hilary Mantel Quote #27

    For I chase but one hind, he says, one strange deer timid and wild, and she leads me off the paths that other men have trod, and by myself into the depths of the wood.

  • Hilary Mantel Quote #28

    Full bellies breed gentle manners. The pinch of famine makes monsters.

  • Hilary Mantel Quote #29

    Have you ever observed that when a man gets a son he takes all the credit, and when he gets a daughter he blames his wife? And if they do not breed at all, we say it is because her womb is barren. We do not say it is because his seed is bad.

  • Hilary Mantel Quote #30

    He draws a line under his conclusions. Says, 'Gregory, what should I do about the great worm?'
    'Send a commission against it, sir,' the boy says. 'It must be put down.'
    He gives his son a long look. 'You do know it's Arthur Cobbler's tales?'
    Gregory gives him a long look back. 'Yes, I do know.' He sounds regretful. 'But it makes people so happy when I believe them.

You May Also Like

Recent Posts

Related Posts

0 comments:

Post a Comment