Quotes from Philippa Gregory

I told you, I don't want you riding with me. Which is why I waited, Frieze explained patiently. To see what direction you were going in, so that I could make sure I took the opposite one. but of course, there may be wolves, or thieves, highwaymen or brigands, so I don't mind your company for the first hour or so.

I am marrying the finest man I have ever known." "It will cost you dear," he warns. "It would be worse to lose him.

Perhaps we will not be great people, chosen by God, but just happy.

Richard looks into my eyes and once again I know us for the children that we were, who had to make our own destiny in a world we could not understand.

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?

How? I murmur. It feels as if I am talking in my sleep, floating down a stream of sleep. How can I conquer the worst fear? You just decide, she says simply. Just decide that you are not going to be a fearful woman and when you come to something that makes you apprehensive, you face it and walk slowly and steadily towards it. And smile.

Getting a woman into power is not the point—it's getting a good woman into power who thinks and cares about what she does.

I will own a cat and not fear being called a witch; I will dance and not fear being named a whore. I shall ride my horse and go where I please. I shall soar like a gyrfalcon. I shall live my own life and please myself. I shall be a free woman. It is no small thing, this, for a woman: freedom.

Then life taught me a harder lesson, beloved: it is better to forgive an enemy than destroy him.

I am so tired; all I want to do is sleep. I want to sleep all the day, from dawn until twilight that every evening comes a little earlier and a little more drearily. In the daytime, all I can think about is sleeping. But in the night I do is try to stay awake.

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.

Be a wife of whom he can make no complaint, Margaret. That is the best advice I can give to you. You will be his wife; that is to be his servant, his possession. He will be your master. You had better please him.

Poor little girl. Poor little girl, Nan says, and at first I think she is speaking of the baby, perhaps it is a girl after all. But then I realize she is speaking of me, a girl of thirteen years, whose own mother has said that they can let her die as long as a son and heir is born.

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.

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.

I think it is unkind of me to stand there with my hands by my sides and a frown on my face. But I let him go without a blown kiss, without a blessing, without a command to come back safely. I let him go without a word or a gesture of love, for he is going out to fight for my enemy and so he is my enemy now.

There was no question now who sat at the right hand of the King. It was the Queen, who walked through the great hall wearing deepest crimson and gold with her head high and a little smile on her lips. She did not flaunt her return to favour. She took it as she had taken her eclipse: as the nature of royal marriage. Now that her star was risen again she walked as proudly as she had ever done when in shadow.

They arouse in themselves a wild vicious hunger more like animals than men. I did not know that war was like this.

One never gets the same summer twice.

She's like an anchor that he has forgotten, but still it keeps him steady.

The art of happiness is being content with what you have,' she would say, looking with apparent satisfaction out of the dusty windows at the garden, yellowing like an uncut hayfield in the October sunshine.

You have to sit with your longing and know that you may not get what you want; you have to encounter the danger of longing for something without the expectation of getting your desire.

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.

She stood silent among the quiet sounds of the night, and certainty came to her.