Top 100 Philippa Gregory Quotes
#1. The White Queen in many ways it is representative of the sort of drama that I'm talking about. The books by Philippa Gregory were best sellers and they specifically told the story of history from the point of view of women.
Colin Callender
#2. They arouse in themselves a wild vicious hunger more like animals than men. I did not know that war was like this.
Philippa Gregory
#3. I felt his hardness and I suddenly understood-an older girl would have understood long before-that this was the currency of desire. He was my betrothed. he desired me. I desired him. All I had to do was tell him the truth.
Philippa Gregory
#4. What a test of love it is, when the beloved is less than perfect.
Philippa Gregory
#5. The tears in my eyes are now running down my cheeks at the thought that I have been his wife and his bedfellow, his companion and his duchess, and even now, though he is near to death, still he does not love me. He has never loved me. He never will love me.
Philippa Gregory
#6. I am a queen" she observes. "It is natural that men are going to gather round me, hoping for a smile.
Philippa Gregory
#7. I was born to be your rival,' she [Anne] said simply. 'And you mine. We're sisters, aren't we?
Philippa Gregory
#8. She's a Boleyn and a Howard,"I said frankly."Underneath the great name, we 're all bitches on heat.
Philippa Gregory
#9. 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.
Philippa Gregory
#10. In truth, I did not have to wonder. She would be feeling that disturbing mixture of emotions that she always summoned from me: admiration and envy, pride and a furious rivalry, a longing to see a beloved sister succeed, and a passionate desire to see a rival fall.
Philippa Gregory
#12. 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.
Philippa Gregory
#13. 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
#14. The bird sings as if to say that delight is easy, for those who desire it
Philippa Gregory
#15. Why not?' She asks the most challenging questions that a woman can ask. 'Why should I not read? Why should I not think? Why should I not speak?
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. 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
#18. Jane had gone to pray for the dead queen, Anne would dance on her grave. The
Philippa Gregory
#19. The common people only see weakness where there is greatness of spirit.
Philippa Gregory
#20. 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
Philippa Gregory
#21. War does not answer war, war does not finish war. The only ending is peace.
Philippa Gregory
#22. 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
#23. I can speak of our baby like this to no one else. Who but his father would linger over the exact width of his gummy little smile or the blueness of his eyes, or the sweetness of his little lick of tawny hair on his forehead?
Philippa Gregory
#25. I will stand up and speak in my own voice and no man will ever silence me again.
Philippa Gregory
#26. ... if I cannot be with my sister, then I don't want any bedfellow at all.
Philippa Gregory
#27. Being a stepmother has worked out very well for me. I love my stepchildren very much.
Philippa Gregory
#28. The moment that changed me for ever was when I had my first seminar with my history professor at the University of Sussex. I realised that history would answer all the questions I had spent my life asking. It was an extraordinary moment.
Philippa Gregory
#29. A man will always promise to do more than he can do to a woman he cannot understand.
Philippa Gregory
#30. 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
#31. All that that I learn just teaches me that I know nothing.
Philippa Gregory
#32. 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
#33. 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.
Philippa Gregory
#34. Although some people think I am a romantic novelist I have always thought of myself as a rather gritty radical historian.
Philippa Gregory
#35. His little gestures of affection, his hand in the small of her aching back, her head brushing his shoulder. When she was with child, she used to cling to him for comfort, and he was always tender with her,
Philippa Gregory
#36. I feel no peace, I feel nothing. I think I will feel nothing forever.
Philippa Gregory
#37. Any ninny with an honest heart, a scheming family, and an open purse can do that.
Philippa Gregory
#38. Good god what men can do to their brains when their cocks are hard.
Philippa Gregory
#39. 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
#40. Once more, I am watching the most powerful men in the kingdom bring their power to bear on a woman who has done nothing worse than live to the beat of her own heart, see with her own eyes; but this is not their tempo nor their vision and they cannot tolerate any other.
Philippa Gregory
#41. I shall be dark and French and fashionable and difficult. And you shall be sweet and open and English and fair. What a pair we shall be! What man can resist us?
Philippa Gregory
#42. Jane," I said quietly.
She opened her eyes, she had been far away in prayer.
"Yes, Mary? Forgive me, I was praying."
"If you go on flirting with the king with those sickly little smiles, one of us Boleyns is going to scratch your eyes out.
Philippa Gregory
#43. My mother? My own mother told my lady governess that if the baby and I were in danger then they should save the baby.
Philippa Gregory
#44. I have given my word that only death will take me from you.
Philippa Gregory
#45. Slowly, like a breeze going through treetops, they doff their hats and bow, and I realize that they are acknowledging me as queen, queen in the place of Margaret of Anjou, Queen of England, the greatest woman in the realm, and nothing in my life will ever be the same again. I
Philippa Gregory
#46. 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.
Philippa Gregory
#49. The most powerful men of the kingdom have dragged a duchess down and sent her out to be a marvel to the common people of London. They are so deeply afraid of her that they took the risk to dishonor their own. They are so anxious to save themselves that they thought they should throw her aside.
Philippa Gregory
#50. 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.
Philippa Gregory
#51. For most of my life i have been adored by fools and hated by people of good sense, and they all make up stories about me in which I am either a saint or a whore. But I am above these judgments, I am a Queen.
Philippa Gregory
#52. And all I want to hear are the sweetest words in the world, when he says: Bed, Wife.
Philippa Gregory
#53. Your trouble, William, is that you have no ambition. You don't see that there is in life only ever one goal.' 'And what is that?'
More', George said simply. 'Just more of anything. More of everything.
Philippa Gregory
#54. 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
#55. We stood for a moment, handclasped in the warm sunshine, and I thought, like a lovesick girl: This is heaven.
Philippa Gregory
#56. 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.
Philippa Gregory
#57. Them till the very last moment, and then what did I do but protect the family from
Philippa Gregory
#58. 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
Philippa Gregory
#60. 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
#61. I had a small looking glass on the wall and I stood before it and gazed at my own reflection.
Philippa Gregory
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. I also felt a storm in the air. It prickled on the horizon. I felt it on my skin. The skies were clear, I could not wish for clearer. But I could feel the clouds massing against me, somewhere over the horizon.
Philippa Gregory
#65. 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!
Philippa Gregory
#66. 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
#67. 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
#69. Go with the knowledge that I will think of you every time I lift your boy from his bed, every time I kneel for my prayers, every time I order my horse, every hour of every day.
Philippa Gregory
#70. 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?
Philippa Gregory
#71. 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?
Philippa Gregory
#72. When he told me that he would fight forever, I knew that he would have to be defeated.
Philippa Gregory
#74. I am marrying the finest man I have ever known." "It will cost you dear," he warns. "It would be worse to lose him.
Philippa Gregory
#75. I don't want to help, I want to hinder. I adore your hair, I like to see it loose.
Philippa Gregory
#76. A steady love, a faithful love, a wife's love is the best.
Philippa Gregory
#77. It's as if our name is both our greatest pride and our curse," I say.
Philippa Gregory
#78. Life is a risk, who knows this better than me? Who knows more surely that babies die easily, that children fall ill from the least cause, that royal blood is fatally weak, that death walks behind my family like a faithful black hound?
Philippa Gregory
#79. 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
#80. Her confidence is extraordinary, her impertinence unforgivable, her words terribly true.
Philippa Gregory
#82. What better way could they spend the last days of the world, than falling in love?
Philippa Gregory
#83. Learning is an ornament to a good woman, not a distraction.
Philippa Gregory
#84. I have seen sights and travelled in countries you cannot imagine. I have been afraid and I have been in danger, and I have never for one moment thought that I would throw myself at at a man for his help.
Philippa Gregory
#85. 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
#86. And now I want love. Lust is no good for me. I want love. His love.
Philippa Gregory
#87. I think nobody in the whole world knows what it is to be in love, to be so beloved.
Philippa Gregory
#88. King himself is as sunny as the mornings. He declares that he is well again, much better,
Philippa Gregory
#89. You don't need to struggle, your baby is coming. Help him come to us, open your body and let him come into the world. You give birth, you don't force birth or besiege it. It's not a battle, it's an act of love. You give birth to your childd and you can do it gently.
Philippa Gregory
#90. Every woman is a mad ugly bad old witch somewhere in her heart.
Philippa Gregory
#91. Wealth means nothing at all if you do not know, to the last penny, what your fortune is. You might as well be poor if you do not know what you have.
Philippa Gregory
#92. I will go to war should there ever be a cause I think worth dying for
and not before.
Philippa Gregory
#93. 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
#94. They say that at the mountain pass he looked back at his kingdom, his beautiful kingdom, and wept, and his mother told him to weep like a woman for what he could not hold as a man.
Philippa Gregory
#95. I did not seek love with Thomas, but I did not resist it. And now I am trapped in desire like a butterfly with its feet in honey, and the more I struggle, the deeper I sink.
Philippa Gregory
#96. I want to teach him his prayers and his letters and his manners. I want him for my own. Not just because he is motherless, but because I am childless and I want someone to love.
Philippa Gregory
#97. Only fools wait when their enemies are coming, to see if they may prove to be friends.
Philippa Gregory
#99. 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.
Philippa Gregory
#100. If it means something to you,then take it to heart. If it means nothing, it means nothing, let it go.
Philippa Gregory
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