“The months run away from you like a flurry of autumn leaves bowling an...” — Hilary Mantel Quote

“The months run away from you like a flurry of autumn leaves bowling and skittering towards the winter ...”

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

“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.”

“Since I was a very small child, I've had a kind of reverence for the past, and I felt a very intimate connection with it.”

“If you have a good story idea, don't assume it must form a prose narrative. It may work better as a play, a screenplay or a poem. Be flexible.”

“When you get fat, you get a new personality. You can't help it. Complete strangers ascribe it to you.”

“Dividing time into Past, Present, and Future suggests that reality is distributed equally among three parts, but in fact the past is the most real of all. The future is, inevitably, an accumulation of loss, and dying is something we all do in our lives.”

“But I have learned that you can't just create your own timetable and will it to come true.”

“There are times when the actual experience of leaving something makes you wish desperately that you could stay, and then there are times when the leaving reminds you a hundred times over why exactly you had to leave in the first place.”

“We ought to regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its antecedent state and as the cause of the state that is to follow. An intelligence knowing all the forces acting in nature at a given instant, as well as the momentary positions of all things in the universe, would be able to comprehend in one single formula the motions of the largest bodies as well as the lightest atoms in the world, provided that its intellect were sufficiently powerful to subject all data to analysis; to it nothing would be uncertain, the future as well as the past would be present to its eyes. The perfection that the human mind has been able to give to astronomy affords but a feeble outline of such an intelligence.”

“People won't have time for you if you are always angry or complaining.”