Philippa Gregory Quotes

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

When a woman thinks her husband is a fool, her marriage is over. They may part in one year or ten; they may live together until death. But if she thinks he is a fool, she will not love him again.

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?

You can smile when your heart is breaking because you're a woman.

Edward lives as if there is no tomorrow, Richard as if he wants no tomorrow, and George as though someone should give it to him for free.

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

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.

Every woman has to have something which singles her out, which catches the eyes, which makes her the center of attention. I am going to be french.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

One never gets the same summer twice.

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.

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

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.

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