“ But Parliament cannot see how it is the state's job to create work. Are not these matters in God's hands, and is not poverty and dereliction part of his eternal order? To everything there is a season:… Hilary Mantel
“ I shall be as tender to you as my father was not to me. For what's the point of breeding children, if each generation does not improve on who went before? Hilary Mantel
“ You must, of course. Robespierre doesn’t lie or cheat or steal, doesn’t get drunk, doesn’t fornicate—overmuch. He’s not a hedonist or a mainchancer or a breaker of promises. Danton grinned. But what’s… Hilary Mantel
“ You know what it's like when a cart overturns in the street? Everybody you meet has witnessed it. They saw a man's leg sliced clean off. They saw a woman gasp her last. They saw the goods looted, thie… Hilary Mantel
“ We say, how did it happen? We ask ourselves. The duke sniffs. We ask ourselves, but by the steaming blood of Christ we have no bloody answer. The steaming blood of Christ. It’s an oath worthy of Thoma… Hilary Mantel
“ Some say the Tudors transcend this history, bloody and demonic as it is: that they descend from Brutus through the line of Constantine, son of St Helena, who was a Briton. Arthur, High King of Britain… Hilary Mantel
“ One fear creates a dereliction, the offense brings on a greater fear, and there comes a point where the fear is too great and the human spirit just gives up and a child wanders off numb and directionl… Hilary Mantel
“ 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… Hilary Mantel
“ I wonder, he says, how it can be that, though all these people think they know the king’s pleasure, the king finds himself at every turn impeded. At every turn, thwarted: maddened and baffled. Hilary Mantel
“ He would have explained, if he’d known what sort of explanation Wykys would understand. I gave up fighting because, when I lived in Florence, I looked at frescoes every day? He said, I found an easier… Hilary Mantel
“ But the nation’s business must go forward, and this is how: an act to give Wales members of Parliament, and make English the language of the law courts, and to cut from under them the powers of the lo… Hilary Mantel
“ At some point on your road you have to turn and start walking back towards yourself. Or the past will pursue you, and bite the nape of your neck, leave you bleeding in the ditch. Better to turn and fa… Hilary Mantel
“ He knows different now. It's the living that chase the dead. The long bones and skulls are tumbled from their shrouds, and words like stones thrust into their rattling mouths: we edit their writings,… Hilary Mantel
“ ... 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… Hilary Mantel
“ I aim to make the fiction flexible so that it bends itself around the facts as we have them. Otherwise I don’t see the point. Nobody seems to understand that. Nobody seems to share my approach to hist… Hilary Mantel
“ It is not easy to talk about a condition once dismissed as ‘the career women’s disease’. But women will continue to suffer until we realise the cost of ignoring it Hilary Mantel
“ You come to this place, mid-life. You don’t know how you got here, but suddenly you’re staring fifty in the face. When you turn and look back down the years, you glimpse the ghosts of other lives you… Hilary Mantel
“ In the first play, the crisis is Thomas More. In the second it’s Anne Boleyn. In the third book, and the third play, it’s crisis every day, an overlapping series of only just negotiable horrors. It’s… Hilary Mantel
