Hilary Mantel Quotes

Rumors of the cardinal’s popularity don’t make him glad, they make him afraid. The king has given Wolsey a pardon. But if he was offended once, he can be offended again. If they could think up forty-four charges, then—if fantasy is unconstrained by truth—they can think up forty-four more.

Wherever he goes he is cheered by the people.
“The people?” Norfolk says. They’d cheer a Barbary ape. Who cares what they cheer? Hang ’em all.”
“But then who will you tax?” he says, and Norfolk looks at him fearfully, unsure if he’s made a joke.

Leases, writs, statutes, all are written to be read and each person reads them by the light of self-interest.

He told me that you had a loathing of those in the religious life. That was why he found you diligent in his work."
"That was not the reason." He looks up. "May I speak?"
"Oh, for God's sake," Henry cries. "I wish someone would."
He is startled. Then he understands. Henry wants a conversation, on any topic. One that's nothing to do with love, or hunting, or war. Now that Wolsey's gone, there's not much scope for it; unless you want to talk to a priest of some stripe. And if you send for a priest, what does it come back to? To love; to Anne; to what you want and can't have.
"If you ask me about the monks, I speak from experience, not prejudice, and though I have no doubt that some foundations are well governed, my experience has been of waste and corruption. May I suggest to Your Majesty that, if you wish to see a parade of the seven deadly sins, you do not organize a masque at court but call without notice at a monastery? I have seen monks who live like great lords, on the offerings of poor people who would rather buy a blessing than buy bread, and that is not Christian conduct. Nor do I take the monasteries to be the repositories of learning some believe they are. Was Grocyn a monk, or Colet, or Linacre, or any of our great scholars? They were university men. The monks take in children and use them as servants, they don't even teach the dog Latin. I don't grudge them some bodily comforts. It cannot always be Lent. What I cannot stomach is hypocrisy, fraud, idleness—their worn-out relics, their threadbare worship, and their lack of invention. When did anything good last come from a monastery? They do not invent, they only repeat, and what they repeat is corrupt. For hundreds of years the monks have held the pen, and what they have written is what we take to be our history, but I do not believe it really is. I believe they have suppressed the history they don't like, and written one that is favorable to Rome.

He stands by a window. A flock of starlings settles among the tight black buds of a bare tree. Then, like black buds unfolding, they open their wings; they flutter and sing, stirring everything into motion, air, wings, black notes in music. He becomes aware that he is watching them with pleasure: that something almost extinct, some small gesture toward the future, is ready to welcome the spring; in some spare, desperate way, he is looking forward to Easter, the end of Lenten fasting, the end of penitence. There is a world beyond this black world. There is a world of the possible. A world where Anne can be queen is a world where Cromwell can be Cromwell. He sees it; then he doesn’t. The moment is fleeting. But insight cannot be taken back. You cannot return to the moment you were in before.

A part of the art of ruling, I suppose, is to know when to shut your ears.

It will be the usual tense gathering, everyone cross and hungry: for even a rich Italian with an ingenious kitchen cannot find a hundred ways with smoked eel or salt cod. The merchants in Lent miss their mutton and malmsey, their nightly grunt in a featherbed with wife or mistress; from now to Good Friday their knives will be out for some cutthroat intelligence, some mean commercial advantage.

Norfolk approaches him. He stands far too close. His eyes are bloodshot. Every sinew is jumping. He says, “Substitute nothing, you misbegotten—” The duke stabs a forefinger into his shoulder. “You…person,” he says; and again, “you nobody from Hell, you whore-spawn, you cluster of evil, you lawyer.”

He says, “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.’ You enter into one and it uses up all the money you’ve got, and then it breaks you and bankrupts you.”

The king turns, he looks at him, astonished. “You are not of Thomas More’s opinion, are you?”
He waits. He cannot imagine what the king is going to say.
“La chasse. He thinks it barbaric.”
“Oh, I see. No, Your Majesty, I favor any sport that’s cheaper than battle.”

Katherine finds him too intimate with his co-legate; anyone who has spent much time with Wolsey, she thinks, no longer knows what honesty is.

But I need a new husband. To stop them calling me names. Can the cardinal get husbands?"
"The cardinal can do anything. What kind of husband would you like?"
She considers. "One who will take care of my children. One who can stand up to my family. One who doesn't die.

More pats his arm. “Have you no plans to marry again, Thomas? No? Perhaps wise. My father always says, choosing a wife is like putting your hand into a bag full of writhing creatures, with one eel to six snakes. What are the chances you will pull out the eel?”

There cannot be new things in England. There can be old things freshly presented or new things that pretend to be old.

It is a sure sign of troubled minds, the habit of quotation.