“I have learned the power of surviving.”
― Philippa Gregory, quote from The Boleyn Inheritance
“It is no small thing, this, for a woman: freedom.”
― Philippa Gregory, quote from The Boleyn Inheritance
“If it has to be done at all, it must be done with grace.”
― Philippa Gregory, quote from The Boleyn Inheritance
“He is a young man with a future of power and opportunity and we are young women destined to be either wives and mothers at the very best, or spinster parasites at the worst.”
― Philippa Gregory, quote from The Boleyn Inheritance
“In a shipwreck, it is every drowning man for himself.”
― Philippa Gregory, quote from The Boleyn Inheritance
“So let me see? What do I have? Surprise! Surprise!”
― Philippa Gregory, quote from The Boleyn Inheritance
“Life is long, and if a woman survives, she can take her pleasures one way or another.”
― Philippa Gregory, quote from The Boleyn Inheritance
“I will own a cat and not fear being called a witch; I will dance and not fear being named a whore. I shall ride my horse and go where I please. I shall soar like a gyrfalcon. I shall live my own life and please myself. I shall be a free woman. It is no small thing, this, for a woman: freedom.”
― Philippa Gregory, quote from The Boleyn Inheritance
“This child could not command a pet dove."
Harsh but true, lol!”
― Philippa Gregory, quote from The Boleyn Inheritance
“Good God, what men can do to their brains when their cocks are hard. It is truly amazing.”
― Philippa Gregory, quote from The Boleyn Inheritance
“He bares his yellow teeth in a smile at me. 'Everyone is always our enemy,' he says. 'But right now, we are winning.”
― Philippa Gregory, quote from The Boleyn Inheritance
“much commented on. I have three new hoods to match, which”
― Philippa Gregory, quote from The Boleyn Inheritance
“She looks down at the ground to hide her smile of pleasure and to affect modesty, but when the dance brings them together and she takes his hand, her eyes come up to him and they gaze at each other with absolute longing.”
― Philippa Gregory, quote from The Boleyn Inheritance
“We are two women who have recognised that we cannot control the world. We are players in this game but we do not choose our own moves. The men will play us for their own desires. All we can do is try to survive whatever happens next.”
― Philippa Gregory, quote from The Boleyn Inheritance
“I want to teach him his prayers and his letters and his manners. I want him for my own. Not just because he is motherless, but because I am childless and I want someone to love.”
― Philippa Gregory, quote from The Boleyn Inheritance
“When I was first at court and he was the young husband of a beautiful wife, he was a golden king. They called him the handsomest prince in Christendom, and that was not flattery. Mary Boleyn was in love with him, Anne was in love with him, I was in love with him. There was not one girl at court, nor one girl in the country, who could resist him. Then he turned against his wife, Queen Katherine, a good woman, and Anne taught him how to be cruel.”
― Philippa Gregory, quote from The Boleyn Inheritance
“I can’t think why men would believe that it is a better world where something beautiful is destroyed and something broken left in its place.”
― Philippa Gregory, quote from The Boleyn Inheritance
“If it has to be done at all, it must be done with grace”
― Philippa Gregory, quote from The Boleyn Inheritance
“If it is to be done at all, it must be done with grace.”
― Philippa Gregory, quote from The Boleyn Inheritance
“never see them again. Surely, a couple so young, so”
― Philippa Gregory, quote from The Boleyn Inheritance
“A steady love, a faithful love, a wife’s love is the best.”
― Philippa Gregory, quote from The Boleyn Inheritance
“His little gestures of affection, his hand in the small of her aching back, her head brushing his shoulder. When she was with child, she used to cling to him for comfort, and he was always tender with her.”
― Philippa Gregory, quote from The Boleyn Inheritance
“them till the very last moment, and then what did I do but protect the family from”
― Philippa Gregory, quote from The Boleyn Inheritance
“And those people like my grandmother, who are so free with their insults and their slaps, who say that it is a tremendous honor and a fine step up for a ninny like me, might well consider that a fool can be jumped up, but a fool can also be thrown down; and who is going to catch me then?”
― Philippa Gregory, quote from The Boleyn Inheritance
“For who could resist a woman who could fall from being queen to commoner and yet still carry herself as if greatness was within?”
― Philippa Gregory, quote from The Boleyn Inheritance
Philippa Gregory
Born place: in Kenya
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“A beginning is that which does not itself follow anything by causal necessity, but after which something naturally is or comes to be. An end, on the contrary, is that which itself naturally follows some other thing, either by necessity, or as a rule, but has nothing following it. A middle is that which follows something as some other thing follows it. A well constructed plot, therefore, must neither begin nor end at haphazard, but conform to these principles.”
― Aristotle, quote from Poetics
“Bad men rule by the feebleness of the ruled; and this is just; the triumph of weaklings would not be just.”
― Plotinus, quote from The Enneads
“The floods washed away home and mill, all the poor man had in the world. But as he stood on the scene of his loss, after the water had subsided, brokenhearted and discouraged, he saw something shining in the bank which the waters had washed bare. “It looks like gold,” he said. It was gold. The flood which had beggared him made him rich.3 HENRY CLAY TRUMBULL”
― Eric Ludy, quote from When God Writes Your Love Story
“It is easier to call the storm from the empty sky than to manipulate the heart of a man; and soon, if my bones did not lie to me, I should be needing all the power I could muster, to pit against a woman; and this is harder to do than anything concerning men, as air is harder to see than a mountain.”
― Mary Stewart, quote from The Last Enchantment
“The Dying Man"
in memoriam W.B. Yeats
1. His words
I heard a dying man
Say to his gathered kin,
“My soul’s hung out to dry,
Like a fresh salted skin;
I doubt I’ll use it again.
“What’s done is yet to come;
The flesh deserts the bone,
But a kiss widens the rose
I know, as the dying know
Eternity is Now.
“A man sees, as he dies,
Death’s possibilities;
My heart sways with the world.
I am that final thing,
A man learning to sing.
2. What Now?
Caught in the dying light,
I thought myself reborn.
My hand turn into hooves.
I wear the leaden weight
Of what I did not do.
Places great with their dead,
The mire, the sodden wood,
Remind me to stay alive.
I am the clumsy man
The instant ages on.
I burned the flesh away,
In love, in lively May.
I turn my look upon
Another shape than hers
Now, as the casement blurs.
In the worst night of my will,
I dared to question all,
And would the same again.
What’s beating at the gate?
Who’s come can wait.
3. The Wall
A ghost comes out of the unconscious mind
To grope my sill: It moans to be reborn!
The figure at my back is not my friend;
The hand upon my shoulder turns to horn.
I found my father when I did my work,
Only to lose myself in this small dark.
Though it reject dry borders of the seen,
What sensual eye can keep and image pure,
Leaning across a sill to greet the dawn?
A slow growth is a hard thing to endure.
When figures our of obscure shadow rave,
All sensual love’s but dancing on a grave.
The wall has entered: I must love the wall,
A madman staring at perpetual night,
A spirit raging at the visible.
I breathe alone until my dark is bright.
Dawn’s where the white is. Who would know the dawn
When there’s a dazzling dark behind the sun.
4. The Exulting
Once I delighted in a single tree;
The loose air sent me running like a child–
I love the world; I want more than the world,
Or after image of the inner eye.
Flesh cries to flesh, and bone cries out to bone;
I die into this life, alone yet not alone.
Was it a god his suffering renewed?–
I saw my father shrinking in his skin;
He turned his face: there was another man,
Walking the edge, loquacious, unafraid.
He quivered like a bird in birdless air,
Yet dared to fix his vision anywhere.
Fish feed on fish, according to their need:
My enemies renew me, and my blood
Beats slower in my careless solitude.
I bare a wound, and dare myself to bleed.
I think a bird, and it begins to fly.
By dying daily, I have come to be.
All exultation is a dangerous thing.
I see you, love, I see you in a dream;
I hear a noise of bees, a trellis hum,
And that slow humming rises into song.
A breath is but a breath: I have the earth;
I shall undo all dying with my death.
5. They Sing, They Sing
All women loved dance in a dying light–
The moon’s my mother: how I love the moon!
Out of her place she comes, a dolphin one,
Then settles back to shade and the long night.
A beast cries out as if its flesh were torn,
And that cry takes me back where I was born.
Who thought love but a motion in the mind?
Am I but nothing, leaning towards a thing?
I scare myself with sighing, or I’ll sing;
Descend O gentlest light, descend, descend.
I sweet field far ahead, I hear your birds,
They sing, they sing, but still in minor thirds.
I’ve the lark’s word for it, who sings alone:
What’s seen recededs; Forever’s what we know!–
Eternity defined, and strewn with straw,
The fury of the slug beneath the stone.
The vision moves, and yet remains the same.
In heaven’s praise, I dread the thing I am.
The edges of the summit still appall
When we brood on the dead or the beloved;
Nor can imagination do it all
In this last place of light: he dares to live
Who stops being a bird, yet beats his wings
Against the immense immeasurable emptiness of things.”
― Theodore Roethke, quote from The Collected Poems
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