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Why are we so attached to the severities of the past? Why are we so proud of having endured our fathers and our mothers, the fireless days and the meatless days, the cold winters and the sharp tongues? It's not as if we had a choice.

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
Choice
Tongues
Cold
Endured
Proud
Attached
Days
Sharp
Choices
Fathers
Father
Mothers
Meatless
Mother
Tongue
Winters
Past
Winter
Severity

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Over the city lies the sweet, rotting odor of yesterday's unrecollected sins.
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When I was thin, I had no notion of what being fat is like. When I worked in a department store, I had sold clothes to women of most sizes, so I should have known but perhaps you have to experience the state from the inside, to understand what fat is like.
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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.
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My concern is less the monarchy as such than the attempt of a fading colonial power to hang onto grandeur.
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Insight cannot be taken back. You cannot return to the moment you were in before.
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I dislike pastiche it attracts attention to the language only.
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Write a book you'd like to read. If you wouldn't read it, why would anybody else? Don't write for a perceived audience or market. It may well have vanished by the time your book's ready.
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Every leader operates under the threat of assassination.
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When people begin to talk about our island story my hackles rise. It is deluded and conservative.
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[Margaret Thatcher] was pretending that running a country was like running a household, which she knew wasn't true.
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It is the absence of facts that frightens people: the gap you open, into which they pour their fears, fantasies, desires.
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It's complementary. It's fairly clear where the boundaries are. When I start telling you the contents of his head, I am making it up. But I try to make it up based on what is on the record. So even my wildest speculations [on Thomas Cromwell] will have a root somewhere.
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Those who are made can be unmade.
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If you are without impulses, you are, to a degree, without joy... 469
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The worship of Thomas More goes beyond Catholics.
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Hindsight is the historian's necessary vice.
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I think if the monarchy were removed tomorrow, it wouldn't have a huge effect on the national mind-set.
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I am very happy in second-hand bookshops would a gardener not be happy in a garden?
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At New Year's he had given Anne a present of silver forks with handles of rock crystal. He hopes she will use them to eat with, not to stick in people.
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[H]ope takes you by the throat like a stranger, it makes your heart leap.
Hilary Mantel