Hilary Mantel Quotes

My parents were dishonest people. If it was my birthday, I knew my mother took me to the K-Mart and she stole my toy. She'd put it in the shopping cart and we'd walk out. I was raised with that.

I did steal socks, but I got caught... don't shoplift, anyone - don't do it! You're just gonna get caught.

The last thing I stole was a box of Coca Cola from a parked truck in Adelaide. I was nice and drunk. It was New Year's Eve. And that was about 28 years ago.

I've definitely stolen a lot of things.

For the most part fraud in the end secures for its companions repentance and shame.

I remember stealing some pic n' mix when I was seven; when I got out of the shop, I burst into tears.

I also felt guilty about the three pens I'd stolen, but only for a second. And since there was no convenient way to give them back, I stole a bottle of ink before I left.

We all have done something unethical.

If you really kill, you don't want to talk about it.

It was hard to turn down the money since I didn't have a job, but I didn't want to exploit my notoriety because I knew the way I'd been living was wrong.

I shoplifted. I was about five years old, and I took a candy from a store. We paid for three of them, but I took four, and I went home and cried. My mom took me back, and I paid for the missing piece.

I cheated once on a spelling test. I didn't know how to spell period. I leaned over the desk and looked at someone else's paper. I was probably ten or something like that.

Guilt and no guilt: these were the worst things. The only thing worse than the guilt was the fear of getting caught.

A boy sent by his father to steal does not go stealthily but breaks the door with his feet.

To have lied is to have suffered.

I never know which is worse: the sorrow when you hit the bird or the shame when you miss it.

When you steal from the library, you are preventing anyone else from reading that book, and the very notion makes me want to drop you in the Void.

I famously stole tons of VHS tapes from a video store I worked in. It was detailed in my special, Laboring Under Delusions. I worked at Tower Video and stole a bunch of videotapes from them, and then got caught and had to return the videotapes. It was a mortifying experience.

The greatest incitement to guilt is the hope of sinning with impunity.

I was just a kid. I think I stole a candy bar. I remember feeling so terrible. It was the worst shock. I was probably 7. That's my least favorite feeling: guilt.

If one good deed in all my life I did, I do repent it from my very soul.

What have you done? What have you given up?' So many things, Cecily. More than you know.

Failure, then, failure! so the world stamps us at every turn. We strew it with our blunders, our misdeeds, our lost opportunities, with all the memorials of our inadequacy to our vocation. And with what a damning emphasis does it then blot us out! No easy fine, no mere apology or formal expiation, will satisfy the world's demands, but every pound of flesh exacted is soaked with all its blood. The subtlest forms of suffering known to man are connected with the poisonous humiliations incidental to these results.

The urging of that word, judgment, hath bred a kind of remorse in me.

Let life be short, else shame will be too long.