“I have seen sights and travelled in countries you cannot imagine. I have been afraid and I have been in danger, and I have never for one moment thought that I would throw myself at at a man for his help.”
― Philippa Gregory, quote from The Queen's Fool
“Because all books are forbidden when a country turns to terror. The scaffolds on the corners, the list of things you may not read. These things always go together.”
― Philippa Gregory, quote from The Queen's Fool
“To stop us reading forbidden books they will have to burn every manuscript. But to stop us thinking forbidden thoughts they will have to cut off our heads.”
― Philippa Gregory, quote from The Queen's Fool
“Daniel, I did not knowwhat I wanted when I was agirl. And then I was a fool in every sense of the word. And now that I am a woman grown, I know that I love you and I want this son of yours, and our children who will come. I have seen a woman break her heart for love: my Queen Mary. I have seen another break her soul to avoid it: my Princess Elizabeth. I don't want to be Mary or Elizabeth, I want to be me: Hannah Verde Carpenter."
"And we shall live somewhere that we can follow our belifs without danger," he insisted.
"Yes," I said, "in the England that Elizabeth will make.”
― Philippa Gregory, quote from The Queen's Fool
“It is not love that matters, Mistress Boy, it is what you choose to do with it. What’d you choose to do with yours?”
― Philippa Gregory, quote from The Queen's Fool
“I could not do it. I would not do it. I sat back on my heels with the book in my hand with the light of the fire flickering and dying down and realized that not even in mortal danger could I bring myself to burn a book.”
― Philippa Gregory, quote from The Queen's Fool
“Ideas are more dangerous than an unsheathed sword in this world, half of them are forbidden, the other half would lead a man to question the very place of the earth itself, safe at the center of the universe.”
― Philippa Gregory, quote from The Queen's Fool
“My advice to you, as you go to your husband, is never to trust him and never love him more than he loves you.”
― Philippa Gregory, quote from The Queen's Fool
“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, quote from The Queen's Fool
“Look, you can't fight everyone... You have to choose where you belong and rest there.”
― Philippa Gregory, quote from The Queen's Fool
“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, quote from The Queen's Fool
“lechery?" he asked with a wink, guessing from the hour that I had been with some palace kitchen-maid.
"Oh aye, most vile," I said cheerfully, and jumped into the boat.”
― Philippa Gregory, quote from The Queen's Fool
“Uzela sam knjige, misleći da ću iz njih trgati po nekoliko stranica, spaljivati ih dio po dio. Prva knjiga, napisana na latinskom, rastvorila mi se u ruci. Zgrabila sam debeli snop mekih stranica. Prepustile su se mojim prstima kao da nemaju snage, kao da nisu najopasnija stvar na svijetu. okušala sam ih istrgnuti iz mekoh hrpta, ali onda sam zastala. Nisam to mogla učiniti. Nisam to željela učiniti. Čučnula sam s knjigom u ruci pokraj treperavog svjetla vatre koja je zamirala i shvatila da se čak ni u smrtnoj opasnosti ne mogu natjerati da spalim knjige.”
― Philippa Gregory, quote from The Queen's Fool
“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, quote from The Queen's Fool
“One should never offend more men than one can persuade,”
― Philippa Gregory, quote from The Queen's Fool
“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, quote from The Queen's Fool
“might be that marriage was not the death of a woman and the end of her true self, but the unfolding of her. It might be that a woman could be a wife without having to cut the pride and the spirit out of herself. A woman might blossom into being a wife, not be trimmed down to fit.”
― Philippa Gregory, quote from The Queen's Fool
“If I burned them, I became as one of those who think that ideas are dangerous and should be destroyed.”
― Philippa Gregory, quote from The Queen's Fool
“It might be that marriage was not the death of a woman and the end of her true self, but the unfolding of her. It might be that a woman could be a wife without having to cut the pride and the spirit out of herself. A woman might blossom into being a wife, not be trimmed down to fit.”
― Philippa Gregory, quote from The Queen's Fool
Philippa Gregory
Born place: in Kenya
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“The odd sensation I had while cooking would often last through the meal, then dissolve as I climbed the stairs. I would enter my room and discover the homework books I had left on the bed had disappeared into my backpack. I’d look inside my books and be shocked to find that the homework had been done. Sometimes it had been done well, at others it was slapdash, the writing careless, my own handwriting but scrawled across the page.
As I read the work through, I would get the creepy feeling that someone was watching me. I would turn quickly, trying to catch them out, but the door would be closed. There was never anyone there. Just me. My throat would turn dry. My shoulders would feel numb. The tic in my neck would start dancing as if an insect was burrowing beneath the surface of the skin. The symptoms would intensify into migraines that lasted for days and did not respond to treatment or drugs. The attack would come like a sudden storm, blow itself out of its own accord or unexpectedly vanish.
Objects repeatedly went missing: a favourite pen, a cassette, money. They usually turned up, although once the money had gone it had gone for ever and I would find in the chest of drawers a T-shirt I didn’t remember buying, a Depeche Mode cassette I didn’t like, a box of sketching pencils, some Lego.”
― quote from Today I'm Alice: Nine Personalities, One Tortured Mind
“What is the use of beauty in woman? Provided a woman is physically well made and capable of bearing children, she will always be good enough in the opinion of economists.
What is the use of music? -- of painting? Who would be fool enough nowadays to prefer Mozart to Carrel, Michael Angelo to the inventor of white mustard?
There is nothing really beautiful save what is of no possible use. Everything useful is ugly, for it expresses a need, and man's needs are low and disgusting, like his own poor, wretched nature. The most useful place in a house is the water-closet.
For my part, saving these gentry's presence, I am of those to whom superfluities are necessaries, and I am fond of things and people in inverse ratio to the service they render me. I prefer a Chinese vase with its mandarins and dragons, which is perfectly useless to me, to a utensil which I do use, and the particular talent of mine which I set most store by is that which enables me not to guess logogriphs and charades. I would very willingly renounce my rights as a Frenchman and a citizen for the sight of an undoubted painting by Raphael, or of a beautiful nude woman, -- Princess Borghese, for instance, when she posed for Canova, or Julia Grisi when she is entering her bath. I would most willingly consent to the return of that cannibal, Charles X., if he brought me, from his residence in Bohemia, a case of Tokai or Johannisberg; and the electoral laws would be quite liberal enough, to my mind, were some of our streets broader and some other things less broad. Though I am not a dilettante, I prefer the sound of a poor fiddle and tambourines to that of the Speaker's bell. I would sell my breeches for a ring, and my bread for jam. The occupation which best befits civilized man seems to me to be idleness or analytically smoking a pipe or cigar. I think highly of those who play skittles, and also of those who write verse. You may perceive that my principles are not utilitarian, and that I shall never be the editor of a virtuous paper, unless I am converted, which would be very comical.
Instead of founding a Monthyon prize for the reward of virtue, I would rather bestow -- like Sardanapalus, that great, misunderstood philosopher -- a large reward to him who should invent a new pleasure; for to me enjoyment seems to be the end of life and the only useful thing on this earth. God willed it to be so, for he created women, perfumes, light, lovely flowers, good wine, spirited horses, lapdogs, and Angora cats; for He did not say to his angels, 'Be virtuous,' but, 'Love,' and gave us lips more sensitive than the rest of the skin that we might kiss women, eyes looking upward that we might behold the light, a subtile sense of smell that we might breathe in the soul of the flowers, muscular limbs that we might press the flanks of stallions and fly swift as thought without railway or steam-kettle, delicate hands that we might stroke the long heads of greyhounds, the velvety fur of cats, and the polished shoulder of not very virtuous creatures, and, finally, granted to us alone the triple and glorious privilege of drinking without being thirsty, striking fire, and making love in all seasons, whereby we are very much more distinguished from brutes than by the custom of reading newspapers and framing constitutions.”
― Théophile Gautier, quote from Mademoiselle de Maupin
“You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, quote from Der kleine Prinz
“It is easy to design devices that work well when everything goes as planned. The hard and necessary part of design is to make things work well even when things do not go as planned.”
― Donald A. Norman, quote from Design of Everyday Things: Revised and Expanded Edition (Revised)
“When you're in a relationship with someone who's selfish, what keeps you in it is the fact that when they shine on you, it's this souped-up shine. And you feel like you're in the club. And you don't even know what club it is. You just know you want to stay in it.”
― quote from Sleepwalk With Me and Other Painfully True Stories
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