Jane Dunn · 480 pages
Rating: (9.9K votes)
“The horror of her incarceration in the Tower was a defining event Elizabeth could never forget. It made a passionate heart more circumspect, a complex nature more contradictory and a fine intelligence sharp as a blade.”
― Jane Dunn, quote from Elizabeth and Mary: Cousins, Rivals, Queens
“Sadly, Mary, from this point on, was not only bound to fail to impress anyone as to her ability as a monarch, she failed so spectacularly that she only reinforced every sixteenth-century stereotype of women as weak-willed, intellectually challenged and emotionally corrupt. Even in the confused aftermath of Darnley’s death she seemed to be increasingly in Bothwell’s thrall. He was a strong man with a sense of mission when she was feeling at her most bereft and in need of guidance,”
― Jane Dunn, quote from Elizabeth and Mary: Cousins, Rivals, Queens
“In living so closely with these queens, inevitably my ideas and prejudices have changed. I became more aware of the profound loneliness of their role; the fear, the danger and responsibility were daunting, yet they accepted this and even revelled in it. The physical suffering and discomfort of their everyday lives was overlaid with such magnificent show and animated with an enormous zest and appetite for life itself.”
― Jane Dunn, quote from Elizabeth and Mary: Cousins, Rivals, Queens
“This was the first example of another interesting pattern in Elizabeth’s life. Lacking parents, lacking close family, unmarried as she would remain, and childless too, Elizabeth when queen surrounded herself with brilliant men, loyal advisors and favourites whom she made as close as family to her. When they became too old, as did William Cecil, Lord Burghley, or died, like Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, she took on their sons.”
― Jane Dunn, quote from Elizabeth and Mary: Cousins, Rivals, Queens
“Catherine’s motto could well have been that genius is a long patience. With the successive reigns of her sons came her chance to show the world how they had underestimated this disregarded queen. What Catherine lacked in beauty she made up for in intelligence, cunning and family ambition.”
― Jane Dunn, quote from Elizabeth and Mary: Cousins, Rivals, Queens
“Mary, throughout her life, sought her friendships with women. She was attracted to sisterly relationships where she, a queen since birth, was naturally deferred to, and elicited much devotion from the women who knew her. But this made her ill-equipped to deal with a woman like Elizabeth Tudor, a woman who looked to men, not her own sex, for the great friendships of her life. Although proud of family and naturally loyal, Elizabeth refused to be seduced by intimations of female solidarity and any play on the natural bonds of sex and blood. In the early years of their direct relationship,”
― Jane Dunn, quote from Elizabeth and Mary: Cousins, Rivals, Queens
“Mary was surrounded in her childhood by powerful women: the French Queen Catherine de Medici; the King’s lover, advisor and friend, Diane de Poitiers; Mary’s grandmother, Antoinette de Guise and finally her own mother, the Dowager Queen of Scotland. In direct contrast, Elizabeth’s earliest experiences were of the transience and impotence of women. Her mother had no real existence for her, her life snuffed out when she was no longer useful to the King. Stepmothers came and went, powerless in the grip of fate or the terrifying whim of her autocratic father. Even Catherine Parr, who inspired in the young Elizabeth a certain affection and admiration, was prematurely erased from life by the scourge of puerperal fever. The only constant image of power in Elizabeth’s growing years was the once magnificent, but increasingly mangy and irascible old lion of England, her father, the King.”
― Jane Dunn, quote from Elizabeth and Mary: Cousins, Rivals, Queens
Jane Dunn
Born place: The United Kingdom
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“Yes, interest! The worm of interest. Are you surprised? No? Yes? One conclusion I have reached here after a year in my cell is that the only emotion people feel nowadays is interest or the lack of it. Curiosity and interest and boredom have replaced the so-called emotions we used to read about in novels or see registered on actors' faces. Even the horrors of the age translate into interest. Did you ever watch anybody pick up a newspaper and read the headline PLANE CRASH KILLS THREE HUNDRED? How horrible! says the reader. But look at him when he hands you the paper. Is he horrified? No, he is interested. When is the last time you saw anybody horrified?”
― Walker Percy, quote from Lancelot
“In a sense, this book is not an autobiography but a biography, because I am writing about someone I used to know. Yes, these events are true, yet sometimes they seemed to have happened to someone else, and I often felt like a curious onlooker or someone trying to remember a dream. I ignored my stand-up career for twenty-five years, but now, having finished this memoir, I view this time with surprising warmth. One can have, it turns out, an affection for the war years.”
― Steve Martin, quote from Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life
“Nikolai did not want to be rescued from that special house and restored to
the brilliancy of the Romanov throne, of this I am absolutely certain. If so
many of his people felt locked in the chains of poverty, then he felt
entrapped by the riches of the dynasty, which is to say that peasant and Tsar alike were liberated by the revolution.”
― Robert Alexander, quote from The Kitchen Boy: A Novel of the Last Tsar
“We only waste energy to have horrible fights with the people we love the most.”
― Tananarive Due, quote from My Soul to Keep
“It was like a dream, a beautiful, soothing dream of late autumn: low, gray skies, smell of woodsmoke, fallen leaves crackling beneath my feet, and somewhere out there, in the farmsteads and plantations ahead of me, swift retribution! Freedom! The bloody work of the Lord!”
― Russell Banks, quote from Cloudsplitter
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