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Book: Giving Up the Ghost
Quotes of Book: Giving Up the Ghost
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  1. Hilary Mantel _ Giving Up the Ghost

    For I imagine the devil, when he goes to walk in the world, spruces himself in his dressing room, where the fire burns blue in its grate and the mirrors are draped with black. I imagine how he sleeks his rough fur with babies' fat, polishes his teeth with ground bones, and swills his mouth with blood; then taking from its peg his tall shiny hat, he sets it upon his head to hide his horns. Its riband is trimmed with plucked feathers from the wings of screaming angels that he chuckles over each day, moribund cherubs who he tickles with a scaly finger as he inspects his toothed steel traps. He pauses on the threshold, patting for his wallet, checking his pockets for his whips and stings. Anxious for respectability, he pulls kid gloves over his claws, but the claws split them. He squints up at God's sky, shakes out his umbrella of skin, and closes behind him the doors of hell: trapping in its sulfur reek.
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  2. Hilary Mantel _ Giving Up the Ghost

    I was {an am} unsure about how I am related to my old self, or to myself from year to year. The hormonal profile of an individual determines much of the manifest personality. If you skew the endocrine system,you loose the pathways to the self. When endocrine patterns change it alters the way you think and feel. One shift in the pattern tends to trip another.
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  3. Hilary Mantel _ Giving Up the Ghost

    {Children's} lives start long before birth, long before conception, and if they are aborted or miscarried or simply fail to materialise at all, they become ghosts in our lives...The unborn, whether they're named or not, whether or not they're acknowledged, have a way of insisting: a way of making their presence felt.
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  4. Hilary Mantel _ Giving Up the Ghost

    People romance about their children long before they are born-long before, and long after. They name them and rename them. They see them as their second chances, "a chance to get it right this time," as if they were able to give birth to themselves. They have children to compensate themselves for the things they didn't do or didn't get in their own early life. They conceive be- cause they feel impelled to make up, to a nonexistent person, for a loss they themselves have suffered. Children are born because their parents feel the defects in themselves, and want to mend them; or because they are bored; or because they feel that in some mysterious way it is time for children, and that if they don't have them their selves will begin to leak meaning away. Some women have babies to give a present to their own mother, or to prove themselves her equal. Motives are seldom simple and never pure
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  5. Hilary Mantel _ Giving Up the Ghost

    Truth isn't pretty, I thought, and the pursuit of it doesn't make pretty people. Truth isn't elegant; that's just mathematicians' sentimentality. Truth is squalid and full of blots, and you can only find it in the accumulation of dusty and broken facts, in the cellars and sewers of the human mind"
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  6. Hilary Mantel _ Giving Up the Ghost

    Concentrate on sharpening your memory and peeling your sensibility. Cut every page you write by at least one third. Stop constructing those piffling little similes of yours. Work out what it is you want to say. Then say it in the most direct and vigorous way you can. Eat meat. Drink blook. Give up your social life and don't think you can have friends. Rise in the quiet hours of the night and prick your fingertips and use the blood for ink; that will cure you of persiflage!
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  7. Hilary Mantel _ Giving Up the Ghost

    The story of my own childhood is a complicated sentence that I am always trying to finish, to finish and put behind me. It resists finishing, and partly this is because words are not enough; my early world was synaesthesic, and I am haunted by the ghosts of my own sense impressions, which re-emerge when I try to write, and shiver between the lines.
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