Quote

History offers us vicarious experience. It allows the youngest student to possess the ground equally with his elders without a knowledge of history to give him a context for present events, he is at the mercy of every social misdiagnosis handed to him.

Hilary Mantel

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Hilary Mantel
Age: 72
Born: 1952
Born: July 6
Essayist
Film Critic
Literary Critic
Novelist
Poet Lawyer
Writer
Hilary Mary Thompson
Dame Hilary Mary Mantel
Social
Ground
Elders
Give
Offers
Handed
Without
Students
Context
Giving
Events
Possess
Every
Present
Student
Knowledge
Equally
History
Allows
Vicarious
Experience
Mercy
Youngest

More quotes by Hilary Mantel

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Fortitude. ... It means fixity of purpose. It means endurance. It means having the strength to live with what constrains you.
Hilary Mantel
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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
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In my 20s I was in constant pain from undiagnosed endometriosis. With no prospect of a cure, I decided I needed a career - writing - that could accommodate being ill.
Hilary Mantel
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To a Brit of my generation, one of the most objectionable things about [Margaret] Thatcher is her falsity. She is a total construct. For one thing, she had a made-over accent.
Hilary Mantel
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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
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[Margaret Thatcher] was always talking about what the prudent housewife should do and what the prudent housewife knew.
Hilary Mantel
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I think psychologically [Margaret Thatcher] is really worth studying. I am reading Charles Moore's biography of her, and he has gotten us right there with a woman who lived the unexamined life, and lived it deliberately, and who has contempt for history, even her own.
Hilary Mantel
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Like every writer, I'm drawn by unlikely juxtapositions, precisely-dated and once-only collisions between people from different worlds.
Hilary Mantel
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If I am feeling broken, I can pick up one of [Ivy Compton-Burnett] books and the next morning I can write again. It puts my mechanism back.
Hilary Mantel
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Fiction isn't made by scraping the bones of topicality for the last shreds and sinews, to be processed into mechanically recovered prose. Like journalism, it deals in ideas as well as facts, but also in metaphors, symbols and myths.
Hilary Mantel
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He thinks, I remembered you, Thomas More, but you didn't remember me. You never even saw me coming.
Hilary Mantel
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To my astonishment, when Wolf Hall came out, people asked if I made it up - [Thomas More] burning of heretics. It was well documented. And he was proud of it! The Brits love lost causes.
Hilary Mantel
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I would have been a disaster as a career politician. I would never have toed a party line.
Hilary Mantel
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I can't think of any male politician who magnetizes love and hate - mainly hate - the way [Margaret Thatcher] did.
Hilary Mantel
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You think you're writing one historical novel and it turns into three, and I'm quite used to a short story turning into a novel - that's happened through my whole career.
Hilary Mantel
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I am very happy in second-hand bookshops would a gardener not be happy in a garden?
Hilary Mantel
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[H]ope takes you by the throat like a stranger, it makes your heart leap.
Hilary Mantel
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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
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My concern is less the monarchy as such than the attempt of a fading colonial power to hang onto grandeur.
Hilary Mantel
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Much historical fiction that centers on real people has always been deficient in information, lacking in craft and empty in affect.
Hilary Mantel