Hilary Mantel Quotes - Page 5

Quotes about:

• The weight of the old world is stifling, and trying to shovel its weight off your life is tiring just to think about. The constant shuttling of opinions is tiring, and the shuffling of papers across desks, the chopping of logic and the trimming of attitudes. There must, somewhere, be a simpler, more violent world.

  Hilary Mantel

  Attitude, Thinking, Trying

  Hilary Mantel (2013). “Three-Book Edition: A Place of Greater Safety; Beyond Black; The Giant O’Brien”, p.147, HarperCollins UK

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• I think it took me half a page of 'Wolf Hall' to think: 'This is the novel I should have been writing all along.'

  Hilary Mantel

  Writing, Thinking, Should Have

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• I would have been a disaster as a career politician. I would never have toed a party line.

  Hilary Mantel

  Party, Careers, Lines

  "My other life: Hilary Mantel" by Hilary Mantel, www.theguardian.com. May 9, 2009.

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• [Margaret Thatcher] scorned and despised other women, and predicated her values entirely on the values of her father, a small town shopkeeper.

  Hilary Mantel

  Father, Towns, Small Town

  Source: newrepublic.com

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• I was the subject of an experiment in love. I lived my life under her gaze, undergoing certain trials for her so that she would not have to undergo them for herself. But, how are our certainties forged, except by the sweat and tears of other people? If your parents don't teach you how to live; you learn it from books; and clever people watch you learn from your mistakes.

  Hilary Mantel

  Clever, Mistake, Book

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• Wolf Hall attempts to duplicate not the historian's chronology but the way memory works: in leaps, loops, flashes.

  Hilary Mantel

  Memories, Way, Chronology

  "Hilary Mantel: how I came to write Wolf Hall" by Hilary Mantel, www.theguardian.com. December 7, 2012.

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• Suppose within each book there is another book, and within every letter on every page another volume constantly unfolding; but these volumes take no space on the desk. Suppose knowledge could be reduced to a quintessence, held within a picture, a sign, held within a place which is no place. Suppose the human skull were to become capacious, spaces opening inside it, humming chambers like beehives.

  Hilary Mantel

  Book, Skulls, Space

  "Wolf Hall & Bring Up the Bodies". Book by Hilary Mantel, 2015.

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• [Margaret Thatcher] was always talking about what the prudent housewife should do and what the prudent housewife knew.

  Hilary Mantel

  Talking, Prudent, Should

  Source: newrepublic.com

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• By the tits of Holy Agnes

  Hilary Mantel

  Holy

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• You mustn't stand about. Come home with me to dinner.’ ‘No.’ More shakes his head. ‘I would rather be blown around on the river and go home hungry. If I could trust you only to put food in my mouth – but you will put words into it.

  Hilary Mantel

  Home, Rivers, Mouths

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• 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.

  Hilary Mantel

  Crush, Pride, Men

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• What is it we are hating? It goes beyond politics. I suppose that my fascination with [Margaret Thatcher] is not just with her political record but with her as a phenomenon.

  Hilary Mantel

  Hate, Political, Fascination

  Source: newrepublic.com

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• This was an idea peculiar to Camille, Maximilien thought, that the worse things get, the better they get. No one else seems to think this way.

  Hilary Mantel

  Thinking, Ideas, Peculiar

  Hilary Mantel (2013). “Three-Book Edition: A Place of Greater Safety; Beyond Black; The Giant O’Brien”, p.48, HarperCollins UK

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• I think I would have been a reasonably good lawyer. I have a faculty for making sense of mountains of information.

  Hilary Mantel

  Thinking, Mountain, Information

  "My other life: Hilary Mantel" by Hilary Mantel, www.theguardian.com. May 9, 2009.

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• 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

  Running, Dog, Morning

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• One of the frustrations of someone like Thomas Cromwell is that, before they step into the light of history, and become extremely well documented, they are not known. A king might be well documented but not everyone.

  Hilary Mantel

  Kings, Frustration, Light

  Source: newrepublic.com

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• Once you're labeled as mentally ill, and that's in your medical notes, then anything you say can be discounted as an artefact of your mental illness.

  Hilary Mantel

  Medical, Mental Illness, Notes

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• Back in my 20s, when I wrote 'A Place of Greater Safety,' the French Revolution novel, I thought, 'I'll always have to write historical novels because I can't do plots.'' But in the six years of writing that novel, I actually learned to write, to invent things.

  Hilary Mantel

  Writing, Historical Novels, Years

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• When narratives fracture, when words fail, I take consolation from the part of my life that always works: the stationery order. The mail-order stationery people supply every need from royal blue Quink to a dazzling variety of portable hard drives.

  Hilary Mantel

  Blue, Order, People

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• In terms of essays, I would say Oliver Sacks. His breadth of hard knowledge and imagination and empathy seems to constitute the perfect mind to me.

  Hilary Mantel

  Perfect, Imagination, Empathy

  Source: newrepublic.com

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• I am very happy in second-hand bookshops; would a gardener not be happy in a garden?

  Hilary Mantel

  Garden, Hands, Very Happy

  "Author, author: I feel nostalgic for disorder" by Hilary Mantel, www.theguardian.com. April 03, 2009.

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• 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.

  Hilary Mantel

  War, World, Able

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• If you are without impulses, you are, to a degree, without joy..." 469

  Hilary Mantel

  Joy, Degrees, Impulse

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• I spend a lot of my time talking to the dead, but since I get paid for it, no one thinks I'm mad.

  Hilary Mantel

  Thinking, Talking, Mad

  "Other voices". Interview with Rachel Cooke, www.theguardian.com. April 24, 2005.

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• My first book was a historical novel. I started writing in 1974. In those days, historical novels meant ladies with swelling bosoms on the cover. Basically, it meant historical romance. It was not respectable as a genre.

  Hilary Mantel

  Book, Writing, Historical Novels

  Source: newrepublic.com

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