Quotes from Philippa Gregory

A man and a woman can love each other so deeply that their hearts beat as if they were one heart, and yet, at the same time, know that they are utterly hopelessly different.

We all had parts to play, we all had costumes to wear, we all had to be as merry as we could be, for the king was always laughing this winter and the queen never stopped smiling. The

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?

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?

am like a girl under a spell in an enchanted castle and he is the knight who comes to rescue me, and now I find that this is a most uncomfortable position to be in—utterly powerless and unable even to complain.

I feel I owe it to the women that their stories should be told fully by us—the descendants and heirs to their very real struggles and genuine victories. And so I hope very much that you will find this novel is a gateway to take you closer to the lives of your inheritance, your forebears: these real women and their world.

I am a dreamer, he concedes. I don't deny it, but I have seen enough to know the world. Perhaps my dream is of a better one.

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

I can tell you my heart turned to stone at York," he says to me frankly. "Freezing cold wind and a rain that could cut through you, and the faces of the women like stone itself. They looked at me as if I had personally murdered their only son. You know what they're like—they love Richard as dearly as if he rode out only yesterday. Why do they do that? Why do they cling to him still?

He had that York gift, didn't he?" he presses me. "Of making people love him? Like your father King Edward did? Like you have? It's a blessing, there's no real sense to it. It's just that some men have a charm, don't they? And then people follow them? People just follow them?

She is defeated, and her husband is vanquished. But everyone knows that she will not accept her defeat, she will plot and scheme for her son, just as Edward told me that I must plot and scheme for ours. She will never stop until she is back in England and the battle is drawn up again. She will never stop until her husband is dead, her son is dead, and she has no one left to put on the throne. This is what it means to be Queen of England in this country today. This

I look up into his face and catch a glimpse of an emotion I never expected to see. His hazel eyes are warm, his mouth is tender. He looks like a man in love.

No, you look like the beauty you are, and you know it. You have that gift, which our mother had, of growing older and becoming more lovely. Your features have changed from being merely those of a pretty girl to being those of a beautiful woman with a face like a carving. When you are laughing and dancing with Edward, you could pass for twenty, but when you are still and thoughtful, you are as lovely as the statues they are carving in Italy. No wonder women loathe you.

Ah, my dear. Sometimes God takes the most precious children to his own.

She did not look like my sister, she did not look like any mortal woman at all. She carried herself as if she were the greatest queen that had ever been born. We

They don't like to think of women in power, women as leaders.

I'm not a girl, afraid of the unknown, I am a woman; I can face fear, I can walk towards it.

The rules of writing history mean that a historian can only speculate about her emotions; but a novelist is allowed, indeed obliged, to re-create a version of them. This is where historical fiction—the hybrid form—does something that I find profoundly interesting—takes the historical record and turns it inside out; the inner world explains the outer record.

When she looked down the hall at Anne and at me it was as if she looked straight through us, as if we were nothing but clear panes of Venetian glass and all she wanted to know was what might be beyond. She did not seem to envy us, nor see us as rivals to her father's attention or even as a danger to her mother's place. She saw us as a pair of light women, so insubstantial that the wind might blow us away in a merciful puff. She

the smell of him and the touch of his skin, I feel my desire for him rise again and we move together.

of the ancient cities of Greece and

your sisters are the keepers of your memories and hopes for the future.

She would have come to me if she could, she would have blessed this baby as she blessed all the others. I had a hard confinement without her here and I expect to miss her for the rest of my life. This baby came into the world just as my mother left it, and so I am naming her for my mother. And I can tell you this-I am absolutely sure that a Tudor Elizabeth is going to be one of the greatest monarchs that England has ever seen.

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.