top of page

"But you see, Crumb, it is hard to give up what you have worked at since you were a boy. There were some Italian visitors once, they were cheering us on, Brandon and myself, and they thought that Achilles and Hector had come back to life. So they said.'But which is which? One dragged through the dust by the other ...The king says, 'You turn your boy out beautifully. No nobleman could do more.''I don't want him to be Achilles,' he says, 'I only want him not to be flattened."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Effort quotes

"Talent helps, but success is only achieved and sustained through consistent effort."
Author Name
Personal Development

"I tried your best and it didn't work, so now I'm going to try my best and I'm sure that I'll succeed!"
Author Name
Personal Development

"Do not stop giving your soul-best."
Author Name
Personal Development

"Plans are easy to make, dreams are easy to dream. But putting your back into it? A little bit of hard graft and discipline? That is just too scary and far too much effort for the masses."
Author Name
Personal Development

"Your race against life must yield effort for you to be productive."
Author Name
Personal Development

"Life is an enduring endeavour."
Author Name
Personal Development

"Hard work will never kill you, it's only going to make you gain more muscles to gather your bumper harvests! Do it and do it hard!"
Author Name
Personal Development

"Do your best, don't worry about the results of your test."
Author Name
Personal Development

"No triumph without a try."
Author Name
Personal Development

"Without strength, can we work to create wealth?"
Author Name
Personal Development
Explore more quotes by Hilary Mantel


"There's a feeling of power in reserve, a power that drives right through the bone, like the shiver you sense in the shaft of an axe when you take it into your hand. You can strike, or you can not strike, and if you choose to hold back the blow, you can still feel inside you the resonance of the omitted thing."
Power


"You can be merry with the king, you can share a joke with him. But as Thomas More used to say, it's like sporting with a tamed lion. You tousle its mane and pull its ears, but all the time you're thinking, those claws, those claws, those claws."
Humor


"Feminism hasn't failed, it's just never been tried."
Feminism


"He saw that it was the gaps that were important, the spaces between the threads which made the pattern, and not the threads themselves."
Observation


"Do you look like the photograph on your book jackets? Authors, I find, seldom do."
Perception


"Fiction leaves us so much work to do, allows the individual so much input; you have to see, you have to hear, you have to taste the madeleine, and while you are seemingly passive in your chair, you have to travel."
Fiction


"Florence and Milan had given him ideas more flexible than those of people who'd stayed at home."
Perspective


"Have you ever observed that when a man gets a son he takes all the credit, and when he gets a daughter he blames his wife? And if they do not breed at all, we say it is because her womb is barren. We do not say it is because his seed is bad."
Family


"Some readers read a book as if it were an instruction manual, expecting to understand everything first time, but of course when you write, you put into every sentence an overflow of meaning, and you create in every sentence as many resonances and double meanings and ambiguities as you can possibly pack in there, so that people can read it again and get something new each time."
Reading


"The way I tell it, he says to Fitzwilliam, you would think that the blow on the head had improved him. That he actually set out to get it. That every monarch needs a blow on the head, from time to time."
Humor
bottom of page