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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“It's actually a rather romantic and dramatic story --- one I would eagerly tell you, except for the fact that I recently forgot it, based on it being far too long and having not enough decapitations.”
― Brandon Sanderson, quote from Alcatraz Versus the Knights of Crystallia
“But he's a missing person nobody's going to miss much.”
― Graham McNamee, quote from Bonechiller
“You've blotted the rich form of desire from my life and left me only some vaguely eccentric behaviors that have grown up to integrate so much pleasure into the mundane world around me. What text could I write now? It's as though I cannot even remember what I once desired. All I can look for now, when I have the energy, is lost desire itself-- and I look for it by clearly inadequate means. At best such an account as I might write would read like the life of anyone else, with, now and again, a bizarre and interruptive incident, largely mysterious and completely demystified-- at least that's what it has become without the day-to-day, moment-to-moment web of wanting that you have unstrung from about my universe. Without it, all falls apart. In a single gesture you've turned me into the most ordinary of human creatures and at once left me an obsessive, pleasureless eccentric, trapped in a set of habits which no longer have reason because they no longer lead to reward. And if I had enough self-confidence, in the midst of this bland continual chaos into which you've shunted me, for hate, I should hate you. But I don't have it.”
― Samuel R. Delany, quote from Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand
“I guess one of the great agonies of life is that we are constantly trying to finish that which is unfinishable”
― Martin Luther King Jr., quote from The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr.
“Send a patroller to check,” said Miles a little tightly. Remembering he was supposed to be a diplomat, he added, “If you please.” Teris”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, quote from Diplomatic Immunity
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