{"author":"Hilary Mantel","author_id":"Hilary+Mantel","total_quotes":113,"quotes":[{"text":"The prose,” Robespierre said. “It’s so clean, no conceits, no show, no wit. He means every word. Formerly, you see, he meant every other word. That was his style.","author":"Hilary Mantel","tags":["journalism"],"id":6671,"author_id":"Hilary+Mantel"},{"text":"The way I tell it, he says to Fitzwilliam, you would think that the blow on the head had improved him. That he actually set out to get it. That every monarch needs a blow on the head, from time to time.","author":"Hilary Mantel","tags":["governmentality","life-experience"],"id":10629,"author_id":"Hilary+Mantel"},{"text":"As the year goes on, certain deputies—and others, high in public life—will appear unshaven, without coat or cravat; or they will jettison these marks of the polite man, when the temperature rises. They affect the style of men who begin their mornings with a splash under a backyard pump, and who stop off at their street-corner bar for a nip of spirits on their way to ten hours’ manual labor. Citizen Robespierre, however, is a breathing rebuketo these men; he retains his buckled shoes, his striped coat of olive green. Can it be the same coat that he wore in the first year of the Revolution? He is not profligate with coats.While Citizen Danton tears off the starched linen that fretted his thick neck, Citizen Saint-Just’s cravat grows ever higher, stiffer, more wonderful to behold. He affects a single earring, but he resembles less a corsair than a slightly deranged merchant banker.","author":"Hilary Mantel","tags":["fashion","humour"],"id":12965,"author_id":"Hilary+Mantel"},{"text":"... Those sectaries in Europe who are always expecting the end of the world, but who hope that, after the earth has been consumed by fire, they will be seated in glory: grilled a little, crisp at the edges and blackened in parts, but still, thanks be to God, alive for eternity, and seated at his right hand.","author":"Hilary Mantel","tags":["historical-fiction"],"id":14984,"author_id":"Hilary+Mantel"},{"text":"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.","author":"Hilary Mantel","tags":["historical-fiction"],"id":16482,"author_id":"Hilary+Mantel"},{"text":"Some readers read a book as if it were an instruction manual, expecting to understand everything first time, but of course when you write, you put into every sentence an overflow of meaning, and you create in every sentence as many resonances and double meanings and ambiguities as you can possibly pack in there, so that people can read it again and get something new each time.","author":"Hilary Mantel","tags":["reading"],"id":21247,"author_id":"Hilary+Mantel"},{"text":"In the forest you may find yourself lost, without companions. You may come to a river which is not on a map. You may lose sight of your quarry, and forget why you are there. You may meet a dwarf, or the living Christ, or an old enemy of yours; or a new enemy, one you do not know until you see his face appear between the rustling leaves, and see the glint of his dagger. You may find a woman asleep in a bower of leaves. For a moment, before you don’t recognise her, you will think she is someone you know.","author":"Hilary Mantel","tags":["cromwell","england","fiction","historical-fiction","the-tudors","thomas-cromwell","wolf-hall"],"id":22326,"author_id":"Hilary+Mantel"},{"text":"He runs his eye along the row of knives in their racks, the cleavers for splitting bones. He picks one up, looks at its edge, decides it needs sharpening and says, 'Do you think I look like a murderer? In your good opinion?'A silence. After a while, Thurston proffers, 'At this moment, master, I would have to say...","author":"Hilary Mantel","tags":["funny","humor","knives","murder","murderers"],"id":22416,"author_id":"Hilary+Mantel"},{"text":"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.","author":"Hilary Mantel","tags":["evidence","history","knowledge"],"id":26766,"author_id":"Hilary+Mantel"},{"text":"And if a diversion is needed, why not arrest a general? Arthur Dillon is a friend of eminent deputies, a contender for the post of Commander-in-Chief of the Northern Front; he has proved himself at Valmy and in a halfdozen actions since. In the National Assembly he was a liberal; now he is a republican. Isn’t it then logical that he should be thrown into gaol, July 1, on suspicion of passing military secrets to the enemy?","author":"Hilary Mantel","tags":["french-revolution","irony"],"id":27502,"author_id":"Hilary+Mantel"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":113,"pages":12,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}