Hilary Mantel citations

“He thinks, I remembered you, Thomas More, but you didn't remember me. You never even saw me coming.”

“It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.”

“Some of these things are true and some of them lies. But they are all good stories.”

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

“The things you think are the disasters in your life are not the disasters really. Almost anything can be turned around: out of every ditch, a path, if you can only see it.”

“You learn nothing about men by snubbing them and crushing their pride. You must ask them what it is they can do in this world, that they alone can do.”

“Why are we so attached to the severities of the past? Why are we so proud of having endured our fathers and our mothers, the fireless days and the meatless days, the cold winters and the sharp tongues? It's not as if we had a choice.”

“Truth can break the gates down, truth can howl in the street; unless truth is pleasing, personable and easy to like, she is condemned to stay whimpering at the back door.”

“Those who are made can be unmade.”

“When you are writing laws you are testing words to find their utmost power. Like spells, they have to make things happen in the real world, and like spells, they only work if people believe in them.”

“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.”

“She is very plain. What does Henry see in her?'"
"He thinks she's stupid. He finds it restful.”

“No ruler in the history of the world has ever been able to afford a war. They're not affordable things. No prince ever says, 'This is my budget, so this is the kind of war I can have.”

“Over the city lies the sweet, rotting odor of yesterday's unrecollected sins.”

“You can be merry with the king, you can share a joke with him. But as Thomas More used to say, it's like sporting with a tamed lion. You tousle its mane and pull its ears, but all the time you're thinking, those claws, those claws, those claws.”

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

“So many years of preparation, for what was called adult life: was it for this?”

“It is almost a joke, but a joke that nobody tells.”

“Fortitude…. It means fixity of purpose. It means endurance. It means having the strength to live with what constrains you.”

“Our virtues make us; but virtues are not enough, we must deploy our vices at times.”