Philippa Gregory Quotes

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

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

~ Philippa Gregory

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

~ Philippa Gregory

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

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.

~ Philippa Gregory

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

~ Philippa Gregory

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.

~ Philippa Gregory

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.

~ Philippa Gregory

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.

~ Philippa Gregory

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.

~ Philippa Gregory

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

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

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.

~ Philippa Gregory

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.

~ Philippa Gregory

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

~ Philippa Gregory

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

~ Philippa Gregory

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

~ Philippa Gregory

And then the sword came down like a flash of lightning, and then her head was off her body and the long rivalry between me and the other Boleyn girl was over.

~ Philippa Gregory

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

~ Philippa Gregory

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

I realize that I can laugh, that it is possible to be happy, that laughter and hope can come back to me.

~ Philippa Gregory

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

~ Philippa Gregory

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

If this is the will of God, it takes a strange and terrible shape. I did not know that the God of Battles was vile like this. I never knew that a saint could summon torment like this.

~ Philippa Gregory

I am fit to capture a unicorn, and I should not be so questioned.

~ Philippa Gregory

My father says there are more than twenty thousand turned out for the king. It seems that most men think that we will win, that York will be captured and killed, though the king in his tender heart has said he will forgive them all if they will surrender.~Will there be another battle?~Unless York decides he cannot face the king in person. It is one sort of sin to kill your friends and cousins, quite another to order your bowmen to fire at the king's banner and him beneath it. What if the king is killed in battle? What if York brings his broadsword down on the king's sanctified head?

~ Philippa Gregory

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.

~ Philippa Gregory

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

You are my heart. Even if you are a broken heart

~ Philippa Gregory

I sit on the bed and kick off my shoes, and he kneels before me and takes the riding boots, holding one open for my bare foot. I hesitate; it is such an intimate gesture between a young woman and a man. His smiling upward glance tells me that he understands my hesitation but is ignoring it. I point my toe and he holds the boot, I slide my foot in and he pulls the boot over my calf. He takes the soft leather ties and fastens the boot, at my ankle, then at my calf, and then just below my knee. He looks up at me, his hand gently on my toe. I can feel the warmth of his hand through the soft leather. I imagine my toes curling in pleasure at his touch.‘Anne, will you marry me?’ he asks simply, as he kneels before me.

~ Philippa Gregory

We stand hand-clasped, our faces quite blank, as if this were not a nightmare that tells me, as clearly as if it were written in letters of fire, what ending a girl may expect if she defies the rules of men and thinks she can make her own destiny. I am here not only to witness what happens to a heretic. I am here to witness what happens to a woman who thinks she knows more than men.

~ Philippa Gregory

She has a smile that grows slowly and then shines, like an angel’s smile.

~ Philippa Gregory

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

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

~ Philippa Gregory