Quotes About Identity

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

We might, either of us, be Queen of England and yet we'll always be nothing to our family.

When they launch snakes you'll have your namesake.

I am not a yard of ribbon. I am not a leg of ham. I am not for sale to anyone.

He had taken George, my beloved George, from me. And he had taken my other self: Anne.

I am, at this moment, what I have always been to him: an object of beauty. He has never loved me as a woman.

Have learned that the most precious thing is a place where you can be as you are, where someone can see you as your true self.

Every woman is a mad ugly bad old witch somewhere in her heart.

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.

Another husband, another new house, another new country, but I never belong anywhere and I never own anything in my own right.

With this contradictory parentage of mine: solid English earth and French water goddess, one could expect anything from me. An enchantress or an ordinary girl. There are some who will say I am both.

Like almost all girls I don't know the date of my birth: my parents did not trouble to record the day and the time. I only know the year and the season, and I only know the season because my mother had a great desire for asparagus when she was carrying me and swears that she ate it too green and her bellyache brought on my birth.

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.

I would not care whether people thought I was special, if my life was truly special. It would not mater to me that people could see me as pious, if I could truly live as a woman scholar of piety. I want to be what I seem to be. I act as if I am specially holy, a special girl; but this is what I really want to be. I really do.

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

When they launch snakes, you will have your namesake.

If a woman is interested in her own struggle into identity and power, then she will be interested in other women. The lives of these, and other women, show me what a woman can do even without formal power, education, or rights, in a world dominated by men. They are inspirational examples of the strength of the female spirit.

She was a woman whose spirit had been hammered and forged until she could only ring true. Compared with the rest of us sho was silver, while we were pewter, a common of lead and tin.

I looked over to Anne. She was untying her mask and watching me with a long calculating look, the Boleyn look, the Howard look that says: what has happened here, and how may I turn it to my advantage? It was as if under her golden mask was another beautiful mask of skin, and only beneath that was the real woman.

She is a being not of this world," my great-aunt says quietly. "She tried to live like an ordinary woman, but some women cannot live an ordinary life. She tried to walk in the common ways, but some women cannot put their feet to that path. This is a man's world, Jacquetta, and some women cannot march to the beat of a man's drum.

Twelfth night, of all the nights of the year, is one where shapes shift and identities flicker.

What's your family? he demanded through clenched teeth. Boleyn. What's your kin? Howard's. What's your home? Hever and Rochford. What's your kingdom? England. Who's your king? Henry. Then serve them. In that order. Did I say the Spanish queen once in that list? No. Remember it.

It's as if our name is both our greatest pride and our curse," I say.

I knew that I was smiling her smile, that she was a dark mirror to me.