Philippa Gregory Quotations

Being a stepmother has worked out very well for me. I love my stepchildren very much.

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.

When I was a child I wanted to be a vet. I'd come home with "lost" kittens and dogs. My mother would tell me to put them back.

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.

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.

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.

For instance, I have never believed that there is only one person for each person in the world. It doesn't make the least sense to me. However, in reality, I fell in love at 45 and I am absolutely certain that my now husband is the only man in the world for me, a truth I find both ridiculous and uplifting.

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.

At the end of the day, I'm writing in a genre that isn't highly regarded.

I am in the interesting position of being sometimes skimmed by the critics and called literature and sometimes called historical fiction.

I don't shop as much as a lot of people but I do like designer clothes.

I would be very, very uncomfortable at teaching, at dreaming to teach, people things.

If I could change one thing about myself I'd be less highly strung. I find my sensibility quite high maintenance.

Although some people think I am a romantic novelist I have always thought of myself as a rather gritty radical historian.

I try to go to the gym three times a week, and I swim, too.

I would never lie to anyone about history.

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.

For Harry Potter I have all the time in the world.

Katherine of Aragon was speaking out for the women of the country, for the good wives who should not be put aside just because their husbands had taken a fancy to another, for the women who walked the hard road between kitchen, bedroom, church and childbirth. For the women who deserved more than their husband's whim.

Before anything else I was a woman who was capable of passion and who had a great need and a great desire for love.

I was born to be your rival,' she [Anne] said simply. 'And you mine. We're sisters, aren't we?

True obedience can only happen when you secretly think you know better, and you choose to bow your head. Anything short of that is just agreement, and any ninny-in-waiting can agree.

Yes, Your Grace," I correct her. "I am My Lady, the King's Mother, now, and you shall curtsey to me, as low as to a queen of royal blood. This was my destiny: to put my son on the throne of England, and those who laughed at my visions and doubted my vocation will call me My Lady, the King's Mother, and I shall sign myself Margaret Regina: Margaret R.

When you pray, you know that you want something, that's always the first step. 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.

Yes, but either way, shamed or not, I shall be Queen of England, and this is the last time you will sit in my presence.

Tell my daughter Elizabeth -- no! Tell all my daughters, everywhere, in all the ages yet to come. Tell them how I died, and why. And tell them to remember this: the future is unwritten. Know your rights.

If it has to be done at all, it must be done with grace.

You can smile when 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.

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?

War does not answer war, war does not finish war. The only ending is peace.

But young hearts mend easily, and hearts that own half of England have something better to do than to beat faster for love.

She looked at me as if for a moment she would seek someone who would understand the dreadful predicament of a woman, in this world ruled by men.

En Ma Fin Est Ma Commencement - In my end is my beginning.

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.

Stars in the night,' he said. 'Something something something something, some delight

We're going' Anne said firmly. So soon?' Percy pleaded. 'But stars come out at night.' Then they fade at dawn', Anne replied. 'This star needs to veil herself in darkness.

When they see us dance. When they see how you look at me. When they see how I smile at you.

...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.

One’s lover is one’s partner in observing and understanding the world. Marriage is a place where joint narratives are composed. If the lover is a liar then all your joint observations are unreliable. You will have to start all over again.

Some women attract desire. Others do not.

When it's done, it's done. And no one will know until it's done.

In Spain," indeed! He would have got no closer than the Indies if I had not showed him how to do it. Stupid puppy.

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.

I wanted the heat and the sweat and the passion of a man that I could love and trust. And I wanted to give myself to him: not for advantage, but for desire.

Plainly, she is quite besotted by him,... a girl, a young girl, and she is falling in love for the first time in her life. ...little Kitty Howard at a loss, stumbling in her speech, blushing like a rose, thinking of someone else and not herself is to see a girl become a woman.

I turn around from the window and for the first time I see him... It is Richard, smiling at my surprise. I run to him, without thinking what I am doing. I run to the first friendly face that I have seen since Christmas, and in a moment I am in his arms and he is holding me tightly and kissing my face, my closed eyes, my smiling mouth, kissing me till I am breathless and have to pull away from him.

And – I think you know, don’t you? – that I love you, Anne.’ I feel as if I have been living in a loveless world for too long. The last tender face I saw was my father’s when he sailed for England. ‘You do? Truly?’ ‘I do.’ He rises to his feet and pulls me up to stand beside him. My chin comes to his shoulder, we are both dainty, long-limbed, coltish: well-matched. I turn my face into his jacket. ‘Will you marry me?’ he whispers. ‘Yes,’ I say.

For he loved her and he understood that a woman cannot always live as a man. He understood that she cannot always think as he thought, walk as he walked, breathe the air that he took in. She would always be a different being from him, listening to a different music, hearing a different sound, familiar with a different element.

One never gets the same summer twice.

To save my son, I would plot with the devil himself.

Sometimes you cannot help what you hear, you cannot help what you see.

I'm utterly indifferent to Kate Middleton's baby.

... all that that I learn just teaches me that I know nothing.

I want to take you for pleasure, and hold you in my arms for desire. I want you to know that it is your kiss that I want, not another heir to the throne. You can know that I love you, quite for yourself, when I come to your bed, and not as the York’s broodmare.” I tilt back my head and look at him under my eyelashes. “You think to bed me for love and not for children? Isn’t that sin?” His arm comes around my waist and his palm cups my breast. “I shall make sure that it feels richly sinful,” - Edward IV to Elizabeth Woodville -

She was like a mother to me...and I betrayed as a daughter will betray her mother and yet, never stop loving her.

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

But I don't forget and I don't forgive.

Anyone can attract a man. The trick is to keep him.

Only fools wait when their enemies are coming, to see if they may prove to be friends.

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

Take care with your words, Jacquetta, especially in cursing. Only say the things you mean, make sure you lay your curse on the right man. For be very sure that 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.

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.

Good god what men can do to their brains when their cocks are hard.

I would play ball with Catherine, and hide and seek: Not a very challenging game in an open meadow, but she was still at the age where she believed that if she shut her eyes and buried her head under a shawl then she could not be seen.

Good Evening , Sir John. I hope that you will accept a little gift from me.' I should be honored, Your Majesty.' I want to give you a little carved stool from my privy chambers. A pretty little piece from France. I hope you will like it.' I should be grateful.' It is for your daughter. For Jane. To sit on. She seems not to have a seat of her own but she must borrow mine.

I never thought it would end like this. I never thought he would leave me without saying goodbye.

I believe in me, in my view of the world. I believe in my responsibility for my own destiny, guilt for my own sins, merit for my own good deeds, determination of my own life. I don't believe in miracles, I believe in hard work.

When they launch snakes you'll have your namesake.

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.

I can't sleep, I can't eat, I can't do anything but think about him. At night I dream of him, all day I wait to see him, and when I do see him my heart turns over and I think I will faint with desire.

Oh yes. Draw your hem back from my mud, little sister.

The world hasn't changed that much; men still rule.

He is my brother. She is my sister. Come what will, they are my kin.

If it means something, take it to heart. If it means nothing, it's nothing. Let it go.

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.

...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.

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.

I am too dark in my heart tonight.

I felt as if we were fighting something worse than Anne, some demon that possessed her, that possessed all of us Boleyns: ambition - the devil that had brought us to this little room and brought my sister to this insane distress and us to this savage battle.

I have learned the power of surviving.

Daniel, I did not knowwhat I wanted when I was agirl. And then I was a fool in every sense of the word. And now that I am a woman grown, I know that I love you and I want this son of yours, and our children who will come. I have seen a woman break her heart for love: my Queen Mary. I have seen another break her soul to avoid it: my Princess Elizabeth. I don't want to be Mary or Elizabeth, I want to be me: Hannah Verde Carpenter." "And we shall live somewhere that we can follow our belifs without danger," he insisted. "Yes," I said, "in the England that Elizabeth will make.

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.

She is Melusina, the water goddess, and she is found in hidden springs and waterfalls in any forest in Christendom, even in those as far away as Greece. (...) A man may love her if he keeps her secret and lets her alone when she wants to bathe, and she may love him in return until he breaks his word, as men always do, and she sweeps him into the depths with her fishy tail, and turns his faithless blood to water. The tragedy of Melusina, whatever language tells it, whatever tune it sings, is that a man will always promise more than he can do to a woman he cannot understand.

He may well speak French and Latin and half a dozen languages, but since he has nothing to say – what good are they?

I have given my word that only death will take me from you.

He promised her that he would give her everything, everything she wanted, as men in love always do. And she trusted him despite herself, as women in love always do.

It is no small thing, this, for a woman: freedom.

A man will always promise to do more than he can do to a woman he cannot understand.

The sons of York will destroy each other, one brother destroying another, uncles devouring nephews, fathers beheading sons. They are a house which has to have blood, and they will shed their own if they have no other enemy.

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.

If there is love enough,then nothing-not nature, not even death itself- can come between two who love each other.

Words have weight, something once said cannot be unsaid. Meaning is like a stone dropped into a pool; the ripples will spread and you cannot know what back they wash against.

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.

I put the charm bracelet away in the purse and return it to my jewel case. I don't need a spell to foresee the future; I am going to make it happen.

The wheel of fortune [...] tells us that we all only want victory. We all want to triumph. But we all have to learn to endure what comes. We have to learn to treat misfortune and great fortune with indifference. That is wisdom.

the bird sings as if to say that delight is easy, for those who desire it

There are many sorts of love. And 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.

When a man wants a mystery, it is generally better to leave him mystified. Nobody loves a clever woman.

Just because one man calls him Allah and another calls him God is no reason for believers to be enemies.

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.