The Queen's Fool Quotes

“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, 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, 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, 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, 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, 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, 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, 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, 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, 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, The Queen's Fool

“One should never offend more men than one can persuade,”
― Philippa Gregory, 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, 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, The Queen's Fool

“Look, you can't fight everyone... You have to choose where you belong and rest there.”
― Philippa Gregory, 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, The Queen's Fool

“We all do the best we can.”
― Philippa Gregory, The Queen's Fool

“Wait”
― Philippa Gregory, The Queen's Fool

“You’ll never get anywhere in borrowed boots.”
― Philippa Gregory, The Queen's Fool

“Who with any wit would ever have a man?”
― Philippa Gregory, The Queen's Fool

“What matters is that a man or woman can believe what they wish”
― Philippa Gregory, The Queen's Fool

“My head and my heart are indivisible. I will not cut myself up into parts so that my heart can have its way and my head think it wrong.”
― Philippa Gregory, The Queen's Fool

“It’s not you I dislike,’ I volunteered. ‘It’s marriage itself. I would not choose marriage at all. What is it but the servitude of women hoping for safety”
― Philippa Gregory, The Queen's Fool

“Ideas are more dangerous than an unsheathed sword in this world”
― Philippa Gregory, The Queen's Fool

“Why are you storing forbidden books?’ I cried out in frustrated anger. ‘Why store John Dee’s books for him?’ His face was gentle. ‘Because all books are forbidden when a country turns to terror.”
― Philippa Gregory, The Queen's Fool

“we ourselves will be transubstantiated, we shall be angels”
― Philippa Gregory, The Queen's Fool

“But I believe that they will be known to us one day. Now we understand a little, and the church of the Pope, and the church of the king, and the laws of the land all say that we should not question. But I don’t believe that it is the law of God that we should not question. I think that he has made this world as a great and glorious mechanical garden, one that works to its own laws and grows to its own laws and that we will one day come to understand it. Alchemy – the art of change – is how we shall come to understand it, and when we know how things are made, we can make them ourselves, we will have the knowledge of God,”
― Philippa Gregory, The Queen's Fool

“His Holy Nature, what I want is the help of his angels, what I want to do is to further his work, to make gold from base, to make Holy from Vulgar.’ He broke off.”
― Philippa Gregory, The Queen's Fool

“I believe there is a creator, a great creator of the world, but I do not know his name. I know the names that he is given by man. Why should I prefer one name to another? What I want to know is”
― Philippa Gregory, The Queen's Fool

“risk to my life, I could not become one of those. I was a young woman living at the very heart of a world that was starting to ask questions, living at a time when men and women thought that questions were the most important thing. And who could say where these questions might take us? The tables that had come from my father for John Dee might contain a”
― Philippa Gregory, The Queen's Fool

“rode in a state of wonder that a country could be so lush and so green; but even among this fertile wealth there was hunger. I saw it in the faces of some of the villagers, and in the fresh mounds of the graveyards. The carter was right, the balance that had been England at peace for a brief generation had been overthrown under the last king, and the new one continued the work of setting the country into turmoil. The great religious houses”
― Philippa Gregory, The Queen's Fool