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Insight cannot be taken back. You cannot return to the moment you were in before.

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
Moment
Moments
Cannot
Back
Insight
Return
Taken

More quotes by Hilary Mantel

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[T]he heart is like any other organ, you can weigh it on a scale.
Hilary Mantel
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It follows that if you are not a mother you are not a grandmother. Your life has become unpunctuated, whereas the lives of other women around you have these distinct phases.
Hilary Mantel
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I'm a very organised and rational and linear thinker and you have to stop all that to write a novel.
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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[H]ope takes you by the throat like a stranger, it makes your heart leap.
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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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
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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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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
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I am sure that all politicians seek the home connection with the voter. But [Margaret Thatcher] carried it to extremes.
Hilary Mantel
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For what's the point of breeding children, if each generation does not improve on what went before.
Hilary Mantel
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As a writer, you owe it to yourself not to get stuck in a rut of looking at the world in a certain way.
Hilary Mantel
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[Margaret] Thatcher could fake her class background, but she couldn't fake the quality of her mind.
Hilary Mantel
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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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Those who are made can be unmade.
Hilary Mantel
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Imagination only comes when you privilege the subconscious, when you make delay and procrastination work for you.
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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What [Margaret Thatcher] made a play for was the acquisitive: our greedy nature. She set aside other things like an identification with community, altruism. The only collective that she understood was: Rally around and slay the enemy.
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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To me, Hillary [Clinton] looks alright. She looks like the kind of woman I admire. She doesn't seem to have distorted her essential nature.
Hilary Mantel