Quotes by Philippa Gregory

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?

There was a magic: and the name of it was love.

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.

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 sees you and little harry and says whatever you choose to do is my will? Yes i do. she says uncertainly.

They are a couple in love, and anyone but a fool would see it is simply that, nothing more- and certainly nothing less.

We are not ordered by God to judge each other. We are not even ordered by him to consider another persons sin. We are ordered by God to let Him consider it, to let Him be judge.

For a moment we glared at each other, stubborn as cats on the stable wall, full of mutual resentment and something darker, the old sense between sisters that there is only really room in the world for one girl. The sense that every fight could be to the death.

You have to choose the best, every day, without compromise...guided by your own virtue and highest ambition

They are girls to whom things happen, and they take it hard. But I bear myself as more than a silly girl. I am the daughter of a water goddess. I am a woman with water in her veins and power in her breeding. I am a woman who makes things happen, and I am not defeated yet. I am not defeated by a boy with a newly won crown, and no man will ever walk away from me certain that he won’t walk back.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

I prayed in silence that perhaps even now, the queen might have a son and might know joy like this, such a strange, unexpected joy- the happiness of caring for a child whose whole life was in my hands.

But the magic moment when he walks alone has not yet happened, and I was praying he would do it before I have to leave. Now he will take his first step without me. And every step thereafter, I know. Every step of his life, and me not there to see him walk.

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 dont 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.

This is a woman whose belly is filled with pride. She has been eating nothing but her own ambition for nearly thirty years.

Any woman who dares to make her own destiny will always put herself in danger.

And now I want love. Lust is no good for me. I want love. His love.