Top 200 Philippa Gregory Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 3 of 5

101. “But Elizabeth and I are accustomed to loss, we are Plantagenets – we dine on a diet of betrayal and heartbreak.”

— Philippa Gregory

102. “You too might find that your women friends are your truest friends, your sisters are the keepers of your memories and hopes for the future.”

— Philippa Gregory

103. “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

104. “Makes no difference,” he said, with his intuitive knowledge of my thoughts. “No difference at all how your first marriage was. This is my marriage, and I want my wife in my bed.” I laughed aloud and snuggled back into his arms. “It’s where I want to be,” I confessed. “Why would I ever want to be anywhere else?”

— Philippa Gregory

105. “I could not love this man, knowing that he would not listen to me, knowing that I was not allowed even to show him my sadness. He was the father of my children and yet he would have no interest in them until they were old enough for him to use as counters in the game of inheritance. He had been my lover for years and yet it had been my task to make sure that he never knew me.”

— Philippa Gregory

106. “Joan was a young woman who tried to walk her own path in the world of men, just as my great-aunt told me. And it led to this cold tower, this swan dive, this death.”

— Philippa Gregory

107. “I will make my own future, not predict it. I don’t need a charm to tell me what I hope will happen. I throw the gold charm which is like a wedding ring up in the air and catch it before it falls. This is my choice. I don’t need magic to reveal my desire. The enchantment is already done: I am in love; I am sworn to a man of earth; I am not going to give this man up. All I have to do is consider how we can stay together.”

— Philippa Gregory

108. “If you are a reader, you are already halfway to being a writer,” she says. “For you have a love of words and pleasure from seeing them on a page. And if you are a writer, then you will find that you are driven to write. It is a gift that demands to be shared. You cannot be a silent singer.”

— Philippa Gregory

109. “Thomas More once told me: lion or king, never show fear or you are a dead man.”

— Philippa Gregory

110. “A single man’s imperfect conscience can never be superior to centuries of tradition.”

— Philippa Gregory

111. “I will learn to smile at my enemies.”

— Philippa Gregory

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

— Philippa Gregory

113. “But seeing those words that were first written, and scratched out, and rewritten again in print and bound into a book, I know that I love the process of writing and publishing. To take a thought and work on it, to render it into the clearest form possible, and then to send it out into the world – this is work so precious and so joyful that I am not surprised that men have kept it to themselves.”

— Philippa Gregory

114. “I have my own loyalties and obligations that I consider and honor. They are not his. They are not at the beck and call of any man.”

— Philippa Gregory

115. “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

116. “I think my heart has broken, but I have offered the fragments to God.”

— Philippa Gregory

117. “Men die in battle; women die in childbirth.”

— Philippa Gregory

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

— Philippa Gregory

119. “I cannot catch courage from his smile. I have to do this all entirely alone, with thousands of strangers watching my every movement. Nothing is to detract from my rise from gentry woman to Queen of England, from mortal to a being divine: next to God. When they crown me and anoint me with the holy oil, I become a new being, one above mortals, only one step below angels, beloved, and the elect of heaven.”

— Philippa Gregory

120. “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

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

— Philippa Gregory

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

— Philippa Gregory

123. “You just decide. Just decide that you are not going to be a fearful woman and when you come to something that makes you apprehensive, you face it and walk towards it. Remember – anything you fear, you walk slowly and steadily towards it. And smile.”

— Philippa Gregory

124. “God speaks to us individually, each and every one of us, that we need neither pope nor priest, nor bleeding statue, to find our way to faith. God is calling and we only have to listen. There are no clever tricks to forgiveness. There is only one way and there is only one Bible, and a woman can study it as well as a man.”

— Philippa Gregory

125. “I wanted to get away from him before he led me into talking, before he made me feel angry, or grieved, or jealous all over again. I did not want to feel anything for him, not desire, not resentment. I wanted to be cold to him, so I turned on my heel and started to walk away.”

— Philippa Gregory

126. “I will stand up and speak in my own voice and no man will ever silence me again.”

— Philippa Gregory

127. “The mown grass is growing again nearly to our knees; we will take a second crop of hay from this field, rich and green and starred with moon daisies, buttercups and the bright, blowsy heads of poppies.”

— Philippa Gregory

128. “The baby should always be saved in preference to the mother. That is the advice of the Holy Church, you know that. I was only reminding women of their duty. There is no need to make everything so personal, Margaret. You make everything into your own tragedy.”

— Philippa Gregory

129. “He treats her as if he would spare her any fatigue, as if he has dedicated his life to her happiness.”

— Philippa Gregory

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

— Philippa Gregory

131. “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

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

— Philippa Gregory

133. “And all I want to hear are the sweetest words in the world, when he says: “Bed, Wife.”

— Philippa Gregory

134. “Nothing in the world matters more than life. You have a long road to walk and a lot of lessons to learn if you don’t know that.”

— Philippa Gregory

135. “It’s not a question of wanting to be queen; it’s not even a question of wanting honorable love anymore. I am mad for him, I am madly in love with him. I would go to him if I had to walk barefoot. Tell me I am one of many. I don’t care! I don’t care for my name or for my pride anymore. As long as I can have him once more, that’s all I want, just to love him; all I want to be certain of is that I will see him again, that he loves me.”

— Philippa Gregory

136. “The more that I learn, the more sure I am that I have very much to learn...”

— Philippa Gregory

137. “I have learned the power of surviving.”

— Philippa Gregory

138. “And swore that whatever the obstacles before me, I should be Queen of England.”

— Philippa Gregory

139. “It matters not at all that I do not want to marry, that I am afraid of the wedding, afraid of consummating the marriage, afraid of childbirth, afraid of everything about being a wife. Nobody even asks if I have lost my childhood sense of vocation, if I still want to be a nun. Nobody cares what I think at all. They treat me like an ordinary young woman, bred for wedding and bedding, and since they do not ask me what I think, nor observe what I feel, there is nothing that gives them pause at all.”

— Philippa Gregory

140. “You will not be a beautiful woman at court with nothing to do but make magic. The road you have chosen will mean that you have to spend your life scheming and fighting. Our task, as your family, is to make sure you win.”

— Philippa Gregory

141. “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

142. “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

143. “You are my heart. Even if you are a broken heart.”

— Philippa Gregory

144. “We are not ordered by God to judge each other. We are not even ordered by him to consider another person’s sin. We are ordered by God to let Him consider it, to let Him be judge.”

— Philippa Gregory

145. “She knew that being a mortal woman is hard on the heart, hard on the feet.”

— Philippa Gregory

146. “How should I forget them? They are around me like wasps around a honeypot.”

— Philippa Gregory

147. “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

148. “I have the Sight, I should have seen it all, but some things are too dark to forsee. These are hard times, and England is a country of sorrows. No mother can be sure that she will not bury her sons. When a country is at war, cousin against cousin, brother against brother, no boy is safe.”

— Philippa Gregory

149. “He greeted Anne with a roar of joy, swept her up and kissed her. You would think he had never been Sir Loyal Heart to his Queen Katherine. You would think it had been his worst enemy who had died and not a woman who had loved him faithfully for twenty-seven years and died with a blessing for him on her lips.”

— Philippa Gregory

150. “There is nothing that sickens a country more than its own people fighting against one another. It destroys families; it is killing us daily.”

— Philippa Gregory