Philippa Gregory Quotes

Everything that highly educated men can do to obscure a simple truth, to make a woman doubt her feelings, to make her own thoughts a muddle, they do to her. They use their learning as a hurdle to herd her one way and then the other and then finally trap her in contradictions of which she can make no sense.

Funny sky,' he said, squinting up at the thick-bellied white clouds and the sun shining so hot on them but not breaking through.
'It feels as if there should be a storm,' I said 'but it was like this at haymaking and the weather never properly broke then.'
'If I was at sea I should run for a port,' Ralph said. He was looking towards the horizon where there was a yellow tinge to the sky over the top of the downs.

And what about Edward, is he still alive?'
'I don't know ... I pray God he is.'
'But you don't expect him anymore?'
'No ... If Edward is alive then I pray God he will find his way to me. And there will always be a candle in the window to light his way home, and my door will never be locked in case one day it is his hand on the latch.

If everyone in Christendom ate nothing but fish on Friday, then the fishermen and their children would eat well the rest of the week.

Come back to me." He laughs. It is not forced; it is the laugh of a happy man, confident in his luck and his abilities. "I will," he says. "Trust me. You have married a man who is going to die in his bed, preferably after making love to the most beautiful woman in England." He holds out his arms and I step towards him and feel the warmth of his embrace. "Make sure you do," I say. "And I will make sure that the most beautiful woman in your eyes is always me.

He is my brother," I said. "I cannot desert him."
"You can go to your own death," William said. "Or you can survive this, bring up your children, and guard Anne's little girl who will be shamed and bastardized and motherless by the end of this week. You can wait out this reign and see what comes next. See what the future holds for the Princess Elizabeth, defend our son Henry against those who will want to set him up as the king's heir or even worse-flaunt him as a pretender. You owe it to your children to protect them.

There is no freedom for women in this world, fight or not as you like. See where Anne has brought herself.

She never thought when she overthrew a queen that thereafter all queens would be unsteady.

They were all wrong and the dreams and seeings were right. And there was nothing wrong with me. I felt my shoulders go back and my head come up, and I smiled at the doctor and promised to be prompt at his house in the morning; and as I smiled I sensed all the familiar strength - the strength which I named as the Lacey strength, Beatrice strength - come back to me, and I looked him in his pale blue eyes and thought to myself: you and I are enemies while you try to change me, for I will never change.

When they see us dance. When they see how you look at me. When they see how I smile at you.

It is not love that matters, Mistress Boy, it is what you choose to do with it. What'd you choose to do with yours?

I don't want to help, I want to hinder. I adore your hair, I like to see it loose.

I knew now what my earlier passion for Harry had hidden from me. That although I had bedded him as a free woman I was as bound as if I were the slave. For it was not a free choice. I had wanted him because he was the Squire, not for himself ... And it was no free choice, because I could not choose to say "No." My safety and security on the land meant I had to keep my special, costly hold on its owner. I paid him rent as surely as the tenants who came to my round rent table with their coins tied up in a scrap of cloth. When I lay on my back, or strode round the room threatening him with every imaginable, ridiculous torment, I was paying my dues. And the knowledge galled me.

Insane", he says simply. "Hopeless. The king is a saint and cannot rule, and his son his a devil and should not.

If this is the will of God, it takes a strange and terrible shape. I did not know that the God of Battles was vile like this. I never knew that a saint could summon torment like this.

That's how it is for women," I said, stung into honesty. "It's not what one would choose - I grant you that. But women are the very toys of fortune.

Just because one man calls him Allah and another calls him God is no reason for believers to be enemies.

In a world where women were bought and sold as horses I had found a man I loved; and married for love. I would never suggest that this was a mistake.

It was Anne who was before the table like a prisoner before the bar. She did not stand with her head bowed as I always did. Anne stood with her head high, one dark eyebrow slightly raised, and she met my Uncle's glare as if she were his equal.

And those people like my grandmother, who are so free with their insults and their slaps, who say that it is a tremendous honor and a fine step up for a ninny like me, might well consider that a fool can be jumped up, but a fool can also be thrown down; and who is going to catch me then?

Anne gave a little giggle. 'Oh what a tragedy Queen! You can smile while your heart is breaking because you are a woman, and a courtier and a Howard. That's three reasons for being the most deceitful creature on God's earth.

It is for your daughter," she said. "For Jane. To sit on. She seems not to have a seat of her own but she must borrow mine." There

A parcel
taken from one place to another, handed from one owner to another, unwrapped and bundled up at will
is all that I am. A vessel, for the bearing of sons, for one nobleman or another: it hardly matters who.

You are not Melusina, rising from a fountain to easy happiness. You will not be a beautiful woman at court with nothing to do but make magic. The road you have chosen will mean that you have to spend your life scheming and fighting. Our task, as your family, is to make sure you win.

And it seems to me that there is nothing more likely to cure a woman of lust than marriage. Now I understand what the saint meant when he said that it was better to marry than to burn. In my experience, if you marry, you certainly won't burn.

of the ancient cities of Greece and

Jane would be the next queen and her children, when she had them, would be the next princes or princesses. Or she might wait, as the other queens had waited, every month, desperate to know that she had conceived, knowing each month that it did not happen that Henry's love wore a little thinner, that his patience grew a little shorter. Or Anne's curse of death in childbed, and death to her son, might come true. I did not envy Jane Seymour. I had seen two queens married to King Henry and neither of them had much joy of it.

Every scholarly history that was written before 1920 was written by a man who had been taught by a man, whose thesis would be examined by a man, and whose book would be published by a male publisher and reviewed by a male critic. This could not change until women were admitted to universities and colleges. When women could train as historians in the universities, they could for the first time research, write, and publish scholarly history.

I cannot be your mistress," I say simply. "I would rather die than dishonor my name. I cannot bring that shame on my family." I pause. I am anxious not to be too discouraging. "Whatever I might wish in my heart," I say very softly.

The truth is the last thing that matters,' she said. 'And you can believe one thing of the truth and me: I keep it well hidden, inside my heart.

Some of us are born to a solitary life.

I feel worse than I have ever done before, because now I know that it is easier to take a country into war than to bring it to live at peace, and a country at war is a bitter place to live, a risky place to have daughters, and a dangerous place to hope for a son.

Personally, I don't think that having a water goddess for an ancestress is a guarantee of freedom against seasickness, nor come to that, shipwreck.

I am sorry for you. And I am sorry for me. When you are sent back to me, perhaps a month from now, perhaps a year, I will try to remember this day, and you looking like a child, a little lost among all these clothes. I will try to remember that you were innocent of any plotting; that today at least, you were more a girl than a Boleyn.

Eyes downcast, she went past me without a glance. Dismissively her gown brushed my knees as if I should have drawn further back, out of her way, as if everyone should always step back to let Anne through. Then she was gone and as I looked up I met the Queen's eye. She looked blankly at me as I might look at a rivalry of birds fluttering in a dovecote. It was not as if it mattered. They would all be eaten in time.

God speaks to us individually, each and every one of us, that we need neither pope nor priest, nor bleeding statue, to find our way to faith. God is calling and we only have to listen. There are no clever tricks to forgiveness. There is only one way and there is only one Bible, and a woman can study it as well as a man.

But Anne, do you love him?" I asked curiously.
The curve of her hood hid all but the corner of her smile. "I am a fool to own it, but I am in a fever for his touch.

Ill wishing is a curse on the woman who does it, as well as the one who receives it. When you put such words out in the world, they can overshoot-like an arrow. A curse can go beyond your target and harm another. A wise woman curses very sparingly. I would hope that you never curse at all."
"Bless you my daughter, and may you remain pure in heart and get your desires.

A steady love, a faithful love, a wife's love is the best.

He is my brother. She is my sister. Come what will, they are my kin.

Men command the world that they know . Everything that men know they make their own. Everything that they learn, they claim for themselves. They are like the alchemists who took for the laws that govern the world, and then want to own them and keep them secret. Everything they discover,they hug to themselves: they shape knowledge into their own selfish image. What is left to us women but the realms of the unknown?

He shrugged. Whatever does it mean? We write poems about it all day and sing songs about it all night but if there is such a thing in real life I'm damned if I know.

All that that I learn just teaches me that I know nothing.

She's ice and ambition and she would see you on the gallows before surrendering her ambition. Anne has dazzled him, and dazzled the court, and dazzled even you.'
'Not me.' George said gently.
'Uncle likes her best,' I said resentfully.
'He likes nobody, but he wonders how far she might go.'
'We all wonder that. And what price she's prepared to pay. Especially if it's me that pays it.'
'It's not an easy dance she's leading.' George admitted.
'I hate her,' I said simple. 'I could happily watch her die for her ambition.

He may well speak French and Latin and half a dozen languages, but since he has nothing to say – what good are they?

Learning is an ornament to a good woman, not a distraction.

I believe in me, in my view of the world. I believe in my responsibility for my own destiny, guilt for my own sins, merit for my own good deeds, determination of my own life. I don't believe in miracles, I believe in hard work.

I am too dark in my heart tonight.

She smiled an empty bitter smile that did not reach her eyes, 'Do you think it can be worse than this? I cannot be charged with treason, I am the Queen of England, I am England. I cannot be divorced, I am the wife of the King. He has run mad this spring and he will recover by autumn. And all I have to do is get through this summer.'
'The Boleyn summer,' I said.

I have to say that I am much less impressed by crucifixion now that I am in childbirth. It is really not possible that anything could hurt more than this. I grieve for the suffering of Our Lord, of course. But if He had tried a bad birth He would know what pain is.

Being a stepmother has worked out very well for me. I love my stepchildren very much.

When I was a child I wanted to be a vet. I'd come home with "lost" kittens and dogs. My mother would tell me to put them back.

Before God, I love you and cherish you more than anything in the world. Of course I want to marry you. I love you heart and soul.

I am happy; I am in his arms, my face crushed against his padded jacket, his arms around me as tight as a bear, so that I cannot breathe. When I look up into his beloved weary face, he kisses me so hard that I close my eyes and think myself a besotted girl again. I catch a breath, and he kisses me some more.

Because she is my sister, and therefore one-half of me.

Although some people think I am a romantic novelist I have always thought of myself as a rather gritty radical historian.

He is a young man with a future of power and opportunity and we are young women destined to be either wives and mothers at the very best, or spinster parasites at the worst.

I feel as if I can think only when I see the words flowing from the nib of my quill, that my thoughts make sense only when they are black ink on cream paper. I love the sensation of a thought in my head and the vision of the word on the page.

He is a sodomite, and my sister is a whore, and perhaps a poisoner, and I am a whore. My uncle has been the falsest of friends, my father a time-server, my mother - God knows - some even say she had the king before the two of us! All of this you knew or you could have deduced. Now tell me, am I good enough for you? For I knew that you were a nobody and I came to find you all the same. If you want to rise to be a somebody in this court you will get blood or shit on your hands. I have had to learn this through a hard apprenticeship since I was a little girl. You can learn it now if you have the stomach." William

For I am in love. For the first time in my life, utterly and completely, I have fallen in love, and I can not believe it myself.

We have been married little more than a year and already there is a terrible silence around some subjects. We never speak of the disappearance of my brothers - a stranger listening to us would think it was a secret between us, a guilty secret. We never speak of my year at Richard's court. We never speak of the conception of Arthur and that he was not, as My Lady so loudly celebrates, a honeymoon child conceived in sanctified love on the very night of a happy wedding. Together we hold so many secrets in silence, after only a year. What lies will we tell each other in ten years?

you are my joy. You are worth tens of thousands.

When i first saw him i thought he was as beautiful as a knight from the romances, like a troubadour, like a poet. I thought i could be like a lady in a tower and he could sing beneath my window and
persuade me to love him. But although he has the looks of a
poet he doesn't have the wit. I can never get more than two
words out of him, and i begin to feel that i demean myself in trying to please him.

She has a smile that grows slowly and then shines, like an angel's smile.

I have to retain the illusion of things happening, I have to make Henry feel more and more intensely loved, I have to give him the belief that things are getting better and better because he is a king and all his life everyone has told him that he shall have the very best. He has been promised cream and gold and honey, I cannot give him 'wait.' How am I to keep going? How am I to do it?" I

People always make up stories about princesses. It comes to us with the crown. We have to carry it as lightly as we can.

And all I want to hear are the sweetest words in the world, when he says: Bed, Wife.

We may be of the same family, but that is the very reason why we are not friends, for we are rivals for the throne. What quarrels are worse than family quarrels?

To let yourself know that you want something, that you yearn for it. Sometimes that's the hardest thing to do. Because you have to have courage to know what you desire. You have to have courage to acknowledge that you are unhappy without it. And sometimes you have to find courage to know that it was your folly or your wrongdoing which lost it; before you make a spell to bring it back, you have to change yourself. That's one of the deepest transformations that can be.

I have seen statues that would look stodgy beside her, I have seen painted Madonnas whose features would be coarse beside her pale luminous loveliness.

He bares his yellow teeth in a smile at me. 'Everyone is always our enemy,' he says. 'But right now, we are winning.

I don't know how much we will rise," I say stoutly. "And I have no fear of falling.
He looks at me. "You are ambitious to rise?"
"We are all on fortune's wheel," I say. "Without a doubt we will rise. We may fall. But still I have no fear of it.

I was born to be Queen of England and mother of the next King of England. I have to fulfill my destiny, it is my God-given destiny.

I wil not heat treason from my own daughter
What will you do behead me for treason? We are not an amry at war
We are an army at war! This is your brother's rightful throne that we are talking about

Fortune's wheel takes you very high and then throws you very low, and there is nothing you can do but face the turn of it with courage.

He's coming for you, is all she says. This is how he always does it. He's coming for you, Kat, and I don't know how to save you. I'm packing Bibles and I'm burning papers, but they know you have been reading and writing, and they are changing the law ahead of me. I can't make sure you obey the law because they are changing it faster than we can obey.

Heart of England; it cannot be attacked without hurting us all. The king listened to him, listened to every word, and at the end of it he said that

Sometimes we win; sometimes we lose. The main thing is that we always, we always go on.

To assure someone that if enough nuns sing enough Masses then her dead child will go to heaven is trickery as low as passing a false coin as good. To buy a pardon from the pope, to force the pope to annul a marriage, to make him set aside kinship laws, to watch as he fleeces his cardinals, who charge the bishops, who rent to the priests, who seek their tithes from the poor – all these abuses would have to fall away if we agreed that a soul can come to God without any intervention. The crucifixion is the work of God. The church is the work of man.

He may make me feel like a fool, and like a woman who can do nothing, but what I can do I will. In my jewellery box is a dark locket of black tarnished silver and inside it locked in the darkness, I have his name: Richard Neville and that of George, Duke of Clarence, written in my blood on a piece of paper from the corner of my father's last letter. These are my enemies, I have cursed them. I will see them dead at my feet.

We were a quartet of idiots trying to look suave.

dance. Last time I danced in these rooms it was the Christmas feast and I was wearing a dress of silk as rich as Queen Anne's own, made to the same pattern as the queen's, as if to force a comparison between her and me - her junior by ten years; and her husband the king, Richard, could not take his eyes off me. The whole court knew that he was falling in love with me and that he would leave his old sick wife to be with me. I danced with my sisters, but he saw only me. I danced before hundreds of people, but only for him.

He is fragile, like a prince of ice, of glass.

Mother, before God," I say, my voice shaking with tears, "I swear that I have to believe that there is more for me in life than being wife to one man after another, and hoping not to die in childbirth!

Look, you can't fight everyone ... You have to choose where you belong and rest there.

There is nothing that sickens a country more than its own people fighting against one another. It destroys families; it is killing us daily.

A woman has to change her nature if she is to be a wife. She has to learn to curb her tongue, to suppress her desires, to moderate her thoughts and to spend her days putting another first. She has to put him first even when she longs to serve herself or her children. She has to put him first even if she longs to judge for herself. She has to put him first even when she knows best. To be a good wife is to be a woman with a will of iron that you yourself have forged into a bridle to curb your own abilities. To be a good wife is to enslave yourself to a lesser person. To be a good wife is to amputate your own power as surely as the parents of beggars hack off their children's feet for the greater benefit of the family.

Hidden from History: 300 Years of Women's Oppression and the Fight Against It, London: Pluto Press, 1973.

When you are still and thoughtful you are as lovely as the statues they are carving in Italy.

What better way could they spend the last days of the world, than falling in love?

I try to go to the gym three times a week, and I swim, too.

It is always harder to make time for the truly precious experiences; there is always the ordinary to do.

As he catches my eye he beams at me, his dark face bright with affection. Anyone can see it who cares to look at him, he is hopelessly indiscreet. He puts his hand to his heart as if swearing fidelity to me. I look to left and right, thank God no-one is looking, they are all getting on their horses and George the duke is shouting for the guard. Recklessly, Richard stands there, his hand on his heart, looking at me as if he wants the world to know that he loves me.

He loves me.

I shake my head as if reproving him, and I look down at my hands on the reins. I look up again and he is still fixing his gaze on me, his hand still on his heart. I know I should look away, I know I should pretend to feel nothing but disdain – this is how the ladies in the troubadour poems behave. But I am a girl, and I am lonely and alone, and this is a handsome young man who has asked how he may serve me and now stands before me with his hand on his heart and his eyes laughing at me.

One of the guard stumbled while mounting his horse and his horse shied, knocking the nearby horseman. Everyone is looking that way, and the king puts his arm around his wife. I snatch off my glove and, in one swift gesture, I throw it towards Richard. He catches it out of the air and tucks it in the breast of his jacket. Nobody has seen it. Nobody knows. The guardsman steadies his horse, mounts it, nods his apology to his captain, and the royal family turn and wave to us.

Richar

Only fools wait when their enemies are coming, to see if they may prove to be friends.

She's a Boleyn and a Howard,"I said frankly."Underneath the great name, we 're all bitches on heat.

I have to tell you, you have to know: I have loved you honorably as a knight should do his lady, and I have loved you passionately as a man might a woman; and now, before I leave you, I want to tell you that I love you, I love you -

I was taught to be queen by Margaret of Anjou, and perhaps I have taught you how to be queen in turn. This is fortune's wheel indeed.' With my forefinger I draw a circle in the air, the sign of fortune's wheel. 'You can go very high and you can sink very low, but you can rarely turn the wheel at your own bidding.

It seems that we have to be married," he says, a harder note coming into his voice. "I am honored by the interest that Parliament takes in the matter. Your family still has many friends, it seems. Even among those who profess to be my friends. I understand from them that you are insisting on the wedding. I'm flattered, thank you for the attention. As we both know, we have been betrothed for two long years. So now we are going to consummate our betrothal.

When you love a man who is less than you dreamed, you have to make allowances for the difference between a real man and a dream. Sometimes you have to forgive him. Perhaps you even have to forgive him often. But forgiveness often comes with love.

What a test of love it is, when the beloved is less than perfect.