Hilary Mantel Quotes

News comes from France of the cardinal’s triumphs, parades, public Masses and extempore Latin orations. It seems that, once disembarked, he has stood on every high altar in Picardy and granted the worshippers remission of their sins. That’s a few thousand Frenchman free to start all over again.

Unreliable, is the word that comes to mind. If all the old stories are to be believed, and some people, let us remember, do believe them, then our king is one part bastard archer, one part hidden serpent, one part Welsh, and all of him in debt to the Italian banks…

We don’t have to invite pain in, he thinks. It’s waiting for us: sooner rather than later.

Thomas More says that the imperial troops, for their enjoyment, are roasting live babies on spits. Oh, he would! says Thomas Cromwell. Listen, soldiers don’t do that. They’re too busy carrying away everything they can turn into ready money.

It’s not easy to speak of nonexistence, even if you’ve already commissioned your tomb.

The trouble with England, he thinks, is that it’s so poor in gesture. We shall have to develop a hand signal for “Back off, our prince is fucking this man’s daughter.” He is surprised that the Italians have not done it. Though perhaps they have, and he just never caught on.

Beneath every history, another history.

His reliquary!" George is upset, astonished. "To part with it like this! It is a piece of the true Cross!"
"We'll get him another. I know a man in Pisa makes them ten for five florins and a round dozen for cash up front. And you get a certificate with St. Peter's thumbprint, to say they're genuine.

The multitude," Cavendish says, "is always desirous of a change. They never see a great man set up but they must pull him down—for the novelty of the thing.

For what’s the point of breeding children, if each generation does not improve on what went before?

He never sees More—a star in another firmament, who acknowledges him with a grim nod—without wanting to ask him, what’s wrong with you? Or what’s wrong with me? Why does everything you know, and everything you’ve learned, confirm you in what you believed before? Whereas in my case, what I grew up with, and what I thought I believed, is chipped away a little and a little, a fragment then a piece and then a piece more. With every month that passes, the corners are knocked off the certainties of this world: and the next world too. Show me where it says, in the Bible, “Purgatory.” Show me where it says “relics, monks, nuns.” Show me where it says “Pope.”

So now, tell me how was Yorkshire.'"
"Filthy." He sits down. 'Weather. People. Manners. Morals.

He will remember his first sight of the open sea: a gray wrinkled vastness, like the residue of a dream.

Evidence is always partial. Facts are not truth, though they are part of it – information is not knowledge. And history is not the past – it is the method we have evolved of organising our ignorance of the past. It’s the record of what’s left on the record. It’s the plan of the positions taken, when we to stop the dance to note them down. It’s what’s left in the sieve when the centuries have run through it – a few stones, scraps of writing, scraps of cloth. It is no more “the past” than a birth certificate is a birth, or a script is a performance, or a map is a journey. It is the multiplication of the evidence of fallible and biased witnesses, combined with incomplete accounts of actions not fully understood by the people who performed them. It’s no more than the best we can do, and often it falls short of that.

Imagination only comes when you privilege the subconscious, when you make delay and procrastination work for you.