Philippa Gregory Quotes - Page 2

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

They arouse in themselves a wild vicious hunger more like animals than men. I did not know that war was like this.

I will go to war should there ever be a cause I think worth dying for-and not before.

This is a generation of men accustomed to warfare, inured to danger and familiar with cruelty.

All this is always for nothing," he says. "Don't you understand that yet? Every death is a pointless death; every battle should have been avoided. But if Edward can defeat the queen, and imprison her along with her husband, then it will indeed be over.

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.

Everything that highly educated men can do to obscure a simple truth, to make a woman doubt her feelings, to make her own thoughts a muddle, they do to her. They use their learning as a hurdle to herd her one way and then the other and then finally trap her in contradictions of which she can make no sense.

My mother? My own mother told my lady governess that if the baby and I were in danger then they should save the baby.

Mother, before God," I say, my voice shaking with tears, "I swear that I have to believe that there is more for me in life than being wife to one man after another, and hoping not to die in childbirth!

Be a wife of whom he can make no complaint, Margaret. That is the best advice I can give to you. You will be his wife; that is to be his servant, his possession. He will be your master. You had better please him.

Your son is heir to an enormous fortune and name. Someone would be bound to bid for you him and take him as his ward.

Like almost all girls I don't know the date of my birth: my parents did not trouble to record the day and the time. I only know the year and the season, and I only know the season because my mother had a great desire for asparagus when she was carrying me and swears that she ate it too green and her bellyache brought on my birth.

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

The tears in my eyes are now running down my cheeks at the thought that I have been his wife and his bedfellow, his companion and his duchess, and even now, though he is near to death, still he does not love me. He has never loved me. He never will love me.

A parcel-taken from one place to another, handed from one owner to another, unwrapped and bundled up at will-is all that I am. A vessel, for the bearing of sons, for one nobleman or another: it hardly matters who.

Another husband, another new house, another new country, but I never belong anywhere and I never own anything in my own right.

The castle will seem very quiet and strange without you here. The stone stairs and the chapel will miss your footstep, the gateway will will miss your laughter, and the wall will miss your shadow.

I say nothing, not one word, from beginning to end, and neither does he. If it were lawful for a woman to hate her husband, I would hate him as a rapist.

We may be of the same family, but that is the very reason why we are not friends, for we are rivals for the throne. What quarrels are worse than family quarrels?

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.