Top 100 Philippa Gregory Quotes
#1. 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.
Philippa Gregory
#2. You have to have faith that you are doing God's will. Sometimes you will not understand. Sometimes you will doubt. But if you are doing God's will, you can't be wrong, you can't go wrong.
Philippa Gregory
#3. But a good man wouldn't marry you for fortune, and perhaps you shouldn't choose such as one as that."
"Shouldn't I?"
"A good man would marry you for love." he says simply.
Philippa Gregory
#4. Ideas are more dangerous than an unsheathed sword in this world, half of them are forbidden, the other half would lead a man to question the very place of the earth itself, safe at the center of the universe.
Philippa Gregory
#5. God does not make the way smooth for those He loves. He sends hardships to try them. Those that God loves the best are those who suffer the worst.
Philippa Gregory
#6. Them till the very last moment, and then what did I do but protect the family from
Philippa Gregory
#7. But you will break Anne's heart.'
'Her heart has to break and her spirit has to break if she is to be any use to her family.' My mother said coldly
Philippa Gregory
#8. In a way. Magic is the act of making a wish come about. Like praying, like plotting, like herbs, like exerting your will on the world, making something happen.
Philippa Gregory
#9. I will go to war should there ever be a cause I think worth dying for
and not before.
Philippa Gregory
#10. For who could resist a woman who could fall from being queen to commoner and yet still carry herself as if greatness was within?
Philippa Gregory
#11. But this world is changing. Perhaps by the time you are old enough to marry the world will hear a woman's voice. Perhaps she will not have to swear to obey in her wedding vows. Perhaps one day a woman will be allowed to both love and think.
Philippa Gregory
#12. ... if I cannot be with my sister, then I don't want any bedfellow at all.
Philippa Gregory
#13. I will stand up and speak in my own voice and no man will ever silence me again.
Philippa Gregory
#14. 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.
Philippa Gregory
#15. I think that all of them must have lost their minds and have forgotten everything we were to each other. I said that they were no sisters to me, that I would forget them. But they have gone further than this: they have become my enemies.
Philippa Gregory
#16. Affection is not important to you, nor to me. You want power Margaret, power and wealth; and so do I. Nothing matters as much as this to either of us, and we will sacrifice anything for it
Philippa Gregory
#17. 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.
Philippa Gregory
#18. I am a queen" she observes. "It is natural that men are going to gather round me, hoping for a smile.
Philippa Gregory
#19. They arouse in themselves a wild vicious hunger more like animals than men. I did not know that war was like this.
Philippa Gregory
#20. I have given my word that only death will take me from you.
Philippa Gregory
#21. Being a stepmother has worked out very well for me. I love my stepchildren very much.
Philippa Gregory
#22. 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.
Philippa Gregory
#23. I would know you anywhere for my true love. Whoever I was and whoever you were, I would know you at once for my true love.
Philippa Gregory
#24. I had never seen a woman in such despair before. It was worse than death, it was a constant longing for death and a constant rejection of life. She lived like darkness in her own day.
Philippa Gregory
#25. A man will always promise to do more than he can do to a woman he cannot understand.
Philippa Gregory
#26. 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
Philippa Gregory
#28. He is my brother. She is my sister. Come what will, they are my kin.
Philippa Gregory
#29. Perhaps there is a God like firelight, but all we can see is the shadows that we cast ourselves when we walk in front of the fire. Then we see great leaping shadows and think that this is God, but really it is only our own image.
Philippa Gregory
#30. Don't waste your courage on hating him. Keep yourself to yourself. And keep up your courage.
Philippa Gregory
#33. She can be pious, she can be learned, she can be witty and wise and beautiful, but if she is married to a fool she will be "that poor Mrs. Fool" until the day he dies.
Philippa Gregory
#34. What if I don't want an unwilling bridegroom, a pretender to the crown, who won his throne through disloyalty and betrayal? What if I tell you that my heart is in an unmarked grave somewhere in Leicester?" She
Philippa Gregory
#35. We never look back. We have no time for regrets or second thoughts. If a plan goes awry we make another, if one weapon breaks in our hands we find a second. If the steps fall down before us we overleap them and go up.
Philippa Gregory
#36. Compared with the rest of us she was silver, while we were pewter, a common mixture of lead and tin.
Philippa Gregory
#37. I don't much like Singapore. It's very big, very modern and very urbanised. As a rule, I prefer older places where you get a sense of the history.
Philippa Gregory
#38. So he left her, because in his heart he feared that she was a woman with a divided nature - and he did not realize that all women are creatures of divided nature.
Philippa Gregory
#39. This child could not command a pet dove.
Harsh but true, lol!
Philippa Gregory
#40. 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.
Philippa Gregory
#41. I like to do the research of history and the creativity of writing fiction. I am creating this thing which I think is twice as difficult as writing either history or fiction.
Philippa Gregory
#42. Your son is heir to an enormous fortune and name. Someone would be bound to bid for you him and take him as his ward.
Philippa Gregory
#43. I believe that to be a free woman is to be both passionate and intelligent; and I am a free woman at last.
Philippa Gregory
#44. 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.
Philippa Gregory
#45. I never thought it would end like this. I never thought he would leave me without saying goodbye.
Philippa Gregory
#46. If He were not God, then one would think it very badly planned.
Philippa Gregory
#48. 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.
Philippa Gregory
#49. As men have to fight, women have to wait and plan. This is your time for waiting and planning, and you must be constant and discreet.
Honesty matters so much less.
Philippa Gregory
#50. I love going to London for a couple of days but I need to be in the country. I like the silence, the smell and the seasonal changes, especially in spring and summer. I really feel that I belong there.
Philippa Gregory
#51. At the end of the day, I'm writing in a genre that isn't highly regarded.
Philippa Gregory
#52. 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.
Philippa Gregory
#53. 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.
Philippa Gregory
#54. She was like a mother to me ... and I betrayed as a daughter will betray her mother and yet, never stop loving her.
Philippa Gregory
#55. Do you really think that God in his heaven with all the angels, there from the beginning of time and looking towards the day of judgement day, really looks down on all the world and see's you and little harry and says 'whatever you choose to do is my will?'
"Yes i do." she says uncertainly.
Philippa Gregory
#58. 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.
Philippa Gregory
#59. Where will you go?" "To the safest place in London," he says with a rueful smile. "A place that loved your husband and will never forgive Duke Richard for betraying him. The only honest business in London." "Where d'you mean?" "The whorehouse," he says with a grin.
Philippa Gregory
#60. We are Plantagenets - we dine on a diet of betrayal and heartbreak.
Philippa Gregory
#61. She looks down at the ground to hide her smile of pleasure and to affect modesty, but when the dance brings them together and she takes his hand, her eyes come up to him and they gaze at each other with absolute longing.
Philippa Gregory
#62. When we lay awake after making love I could hear the sleepy birds settling in their nests in the thatch. We had a little pallet bed, a table and two stools, a fireplace where we warmed up our dinner from the palace, and nothing more. We wanted nothing more.
Philippa Gregory
#63. I knew when I first saw you that you were the woman I would want for all my life.
Philippa Gregory
#64. I am too young to understand that a man and a woman can love each other so deeply that their hearts beat as if they were one heart, and yet, know that they are utterly and hopelessly different
Philippa Gregory
#66. We fell asleep wrapped in each other as if we could not bear to part, even in sleep we could not bear to let each other go.
Philippa Gregory
#67. 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.
Philippa Gregory
#68. Insane", he says simply. "Hopeless. The king is a saint and cannot rule, and his son his a devil and should not.
Philippa Gregory
#69. Another husband, another new house, another new country, but I never belong anywhere and I never own anything in my own right.
Philippa Gregory
#70. 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.
Philippa Gregory
#71. Because all books are forbidden when a country turns to terror. The scaffolds on the corners, the list of things you may not read. These things always go together.
Philippa Gregory
#72. The house I grew up in was a tall Victorian town house in Bristol. There were very big rooms, which were under-furnished and always cold.
Philippa Gregory
#73. 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.
Philippa Gregory
#74. Sometimes God gives us a moment of destiny, and we have to hear the call and rise to it.
Philippa Gregory
#75. This is a generation of men accustomed to warfare, inured to danger and familiar with cruelty.
Philippa Gregory
#76. A single man's imperfect conscience can never be superior to centuries of tradition.
Philippa Gregory
#77. She did not want him to know that she was not his beloved little sister any more but a woman who had learned to throw everything, even her mortal soul, into the battle to become queen.
Philippa Gregory
#78. This is a woman whose belly is filled with pride. She has been eating nothing but her own ambition for nearly thirty years.
Philippa Gregory
#79. She's like an anchor that he has forgotten, but still it keeps him steady.
Philippa Gregory
#80. The king is a saint and cannot rule, and his son is a devil and should not.
Philippa Gregory
#81. But to tell you the truth, it is the same for me. I am as envious of her as she is of me. But I have seen her rise and rise.
Philippa Gregory
#82. Lechery?" he asked with a wink, guessing from the hour that I had been with some palace kitchen-maid.
"Oh aye, most vile," I said cheerfully, and jumped into the boat.
Philippa Gregory
#83. She can speak three languages, but she can tell the truth in none of them.
Philippa Gregory
#84. When it's done, it's done. And no one will know until it's done.
Philippa Gregory
#85. But I want to be loved. I have always been loved. I want my husband to love me with a passion, like in a troubadour tale, like a knight.
Philippa Gregory
#86. I love reading and I love thinking - the reason that I love my books so much is that in order to write them I have to read and to think for years at a time about the same period of time.
Philippa Gregory
#87. dear god, I am only twenty seven, my cause is defeated, my husband is dead. am I to be one of the poor widows who will spend the rest of their days at someone else's fireside trying to be a good guest? shall I never be kissed again? shall I never feel joy? not ever again?
Philippa Gregory
#88. And then the sword came down like a flash of lightning, and then her head was off her body and the long rivalry between me and the other Boleyn girl was over.
Philippa Gregory
#90. I am fit to capture a unicorn, and I should not be so questioned ...
Philippa Gregory
#91. Thomas More once told me: lion or king, never show fear or you are a dead man.
Philippa Gregory
#92. We will have to cut our coats to suit our cloth, and wait and see.
Philippa Gregory
#93. Ah, Hannah, you have never longed to live as I long to live if you do not know that another day is the most precious thing.
Philippa Gregory
#94. In the cellar, the two young women were shrouded in darkness as if they were already in their grave.
Philippa Gregory
#95. 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.
Philippa Gregory
#96. I can't think why men would believe that it is a better world where something beautiful is destroyed and something broken left in its place.
Philippa Gregory
#98. Before anything else I was a woman who was capable of passion and who had a great need and a great desire for love.
Philippa Gregory
#99. She poured me a cup of coffee and I drank it standing by the back door, looking out of the back garden. I felt it scald my tongue but it did not warm me. It was heavy with sugar but it did not taste sweet. I gave a little sigh. There are some days when nothing seems right.
Philippa Gregory
#100. I realize that I can laugh, that it is possible to be happy, that laughter and hope can come back to me.
Philippa Gregory
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