[Margaret] Thatcher could fake her class background, but she couldn't fake the quality of her mind.

When you are writing laws you are testing words to find their utmost power. Like spells, they have to make things happen in the real world, and like spells, they only work if people believe in them.

Wolf Hall attempts to duplicate not the historian's chronology but the way memory works: in leaps, loops, flashes.

[Margaret] Thatcher could fake her class background, but she couldn't fake the quality of her mind.

I was the subject of an experiment in love. I lived my life under her gaze, undergoing certain trials for her so that she would not have to undergo them for herself. But, how are our certainties forged, except by the sweat and tears of other people? If your parents don't teach you how to live; you learn it from books; and clever people watch you learn from your mistakes.

When you have committed enough words to paper, you feel you have a spine stiff enough to stand up in the wind. But when you stop writing, you find that's all you are - a spine, a row of rattling vertebrae, dried out like an old quill pen.

[T]he heart is like any other organ, you can weigh it on a scale.