“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.”
― Hilary Mantel, quote from Bring Up the Bodies
“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.”
― Hilary Mantel, quote from Bring Up the Bodies
“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.”
― Hilary Mantel, quote from Bring Up the Bodies
“Those who are made can be unmade.”
― Hilary Mantel, quote from Bring Up the Bodies
“She is very plain. What does Henry see in her?'"
"He thinks she's stupid. He finds it restful.”
― Hilary Mantel, quote from Bring Up the Bodies
“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.”
― Hilary Mantel, quote from Bring Up the Bodies
“He once thought it himself, that he might die with grief: for his wife, his daughters, his sisters, his father and master the cardinal. But pulse, obdurate, keeps its rhythm. You think you cannot keep breathing, but your ribcage has other ideas, rising and falling, emitting sighs. You must thrive in spite of yourself; and so that you may do it, God takes out your heart of flesh, and gives you a heart of stone.”
― Hilary Mantel, quote from Bring Up the Bodies
“What is the nature of the border between truth and lies? It is permeable and blurred because it is planted thick with rumour, confabulation, misunderstandings and twisted tales. 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.”
― Hilary Mantel, quote from Bring Up the Bodies
“It is better not to try people, not to force them to desperation. Make them prosper; out of superfluidity, they will be generous. Full bellies breed gentle manners. The pinch of famine makes monsters.”
― Hilary Mantel, quote from Bring Up the Bodies
“He needs guilty men. So he has found men who are guilty. Though perhaps not guilty as charged.”
― Hilary Mantel, quote from Bring Up the Bodies
“Once he had watched Liz making a silk braid. One end was pinned to the wall and on each finger of her raised hands she was spinning loops of thread, her fingers flying so fast he couldn’t see how it worked. ‘Slow down,’ he said, ‘so I can see how you do it,’ but she’d laughed and said, ‘I can’t slow down, if I stopped to think how I was doing it I couldn’t do it at all.”
― Hilary Mantel, quote from Bring Up the Bodies
“Sometimes peace looks like war, you cannot tell them apart.”
― Hilary Mantel, quote from Bring Up the Bodies
“Rafe asks him, could the king's freedom be obtained, sir, with more economy of means? Less bloodshed?
Look, he says: once you have exhausted the process of negotiation and compromise, one you have fixed on the destruction of an enemy, that destruction must be swift and it must be perfect. Before you even glance in his direction, you should have his name on a warrant, the ports blocked, his wife and friends bought, his heir under your protection, his money in your strong room and his dog running to your whistle. Before he wakes in the morning, you should have the axe in your hand.”
― Hilary Mantel, quote from Bring Up the Bodies
“There is a pause, while she turns the great pages of her volume of rage, and puts her finger on just the right word.”
― Hilary Mantel, quote from Bring Up the Bodies
“...an elegant woman, with a refinement that makes mere prettiness seem redundant.”
― Hilary Mantel, quote from Bring Up the Bodies
“Erasmus says that you should praise a ruler even for qualities he does not have. For the flattery gives him to think. And the qualities he presently lacks, he might go to work on them.”
― Hilary Mantel, quote from Bring Up the Bodies
“A statute is written to entrap meaning, a poem to escape it.”
― Hilary Mantel, quote from Bring Up the Bodies
“...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 from Bring Up the Bodies
“Anne's lovers are phantom gentlemen, flitting by night with adulterous intent. They come and go by night, unchallenged. They skim over the river like midges, flicker against the dark, their doublets sewn with diamonds. The moon sees them, peering from her hood of bone, and Thames water reflects them, glimmering like fish, like pearls.”
― Hilary Mantel, quote from Bring Up the Bodies
“Your love of glory must conquer your will to survive; or why fight at all? Why not be a smith, a brewer, a wool merchant? Why are you in the contest, if not to win, and if not to win, then to die?”
― Hilary Mantel, quote from Bring Up the Bodies
“Account books form a narrative as engaging as any tale of sea monsters or cannibals.”
― Hilary Mantel, quote from Bring Up the Bodies
“How many men can say, as I must, 'I am a man whose only friend is the King of England'? I have everything, you would think. And yet take Henry away, and I have nothing.”
― Hilary Mantel, quote from Bring Up the Bodies
“He doesn't believe the dead need our prayers, nor can they use them. But anyone who knows the Bible as he does, knows that our God is a capricious God, and there's no harm in hedging your bets.”
― Hilary Mantel, quote from Bring Up the Bodies
“God knows our hearts. There is no need for an idle formula or an intermediary. No need for language either: God is beyond translation.”
― Hilary Mantel, quote from Bring Up the Bodies
“Slow down,’ he said, ‘so I can see how you do it,’ but she’d laughed and said, ‘I can’t slow down, if I stopped to think how I was doing it I couldn’t do it at all.”
― Hilary Mantel, quote from Bring Up the Bodies
“~ You know young Francis Weston? He that waits on the king? His people are giving out that you’re a Hebrew... Next time you’re at court, take your cock out and put it on the table and see what he says to that.
~ I do that anyway, if the conversation flags.”
― Hilary Mantel, quote from Bring Up the Bodies
“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, thieves stealing from the back-end while the carter was crushed at the front. They heard a man roar out his last confession, while another whispered his last will and testament. And if all the people who say they were there had really been there, then the dregs of London would have drained to the one spot, the gaols emptied of thieves, the beds empty of whores, and all the lawyers standing on the shoulders of the butchers to get a better look.”
― Hilary Mantel, quote from Bring Up the Bodies
“Edward Seymour says, ‘You should have been a bishop, Cromwell.’
‘Edward,’ he says, ‘I should have been Pope.”
― Hilary Mantel, quote from Bring Up the Bodies
“They claim they're living the vita apostolica; but you didn't find the apostles feeling each other's bollocks.”
― Hilary Mantel, quote from Bring Up the Bodies
“When Wyatt writes, his lines fledge feathers, and unfolding this plumage they dive below their meaning and skim above it. They tell us that the rules of power and the rules of war are the same, the art is to deceive; and you will deceive, and be deceived in your turn, whether you are an ambassador or a suitor. Now, if a man's subject is deception, you are deceived if you think you grasp his meaning. You close your hand as it flies away. A statute is written to entrap meaning, a poem to escape it.”
― Hilary Mantel, quote from Bring Up the Bodies
Hilary Mantel
Born place: in Glossop, Derbyshire, England, The United Kingdom
Born date July 6, 1952
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“No,” Trey says. “Males rarely touch each other.” “Really?” “And females rarely touch males they don’t know or who aren’t a part of their family,” he adds, making me feel awkward all of a sudden. I’ve been holding his hand all day, I think, feeling stupid.”
― Amy A. Bartol, quote from Under Different Stars
“our investigation led us to discover was that at the peak of the battle the Jewish soldiers owed their success less to their courage than to the sudden arrival of a most unusual ally: a swarm of bees, infuriated by the smell of gunpowder, descended on the helpless Arab legionnaires and forced them to abandon their dominating position above the monastery.”
― Larry Collins, quote from O Jerusalem
“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.”
― Steven Pinker, quote from The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century
“The hell with naseeb. Naseeb is what people blame for every thing they can't fix.”
― Nadia Hashimi, quote from The Pearl That Broke Its Shell
“We have a saying. My people call it 'choosing the path of fewest lashes.'"
"That's terrible," I murmur; half to myself.
"You mistake 'terrible' for 'different,'" he says. "You have a similar say, do you not? 'The lesser of two evils'?”
― Rae Carson, quote from The Bitter Kingdom
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