The Strangled Queen Quotes

“Mediocrities can tolerate being surrounded only by flatterers who conceal their mediocrity.”
― Maurice Druon, The Strangled Queen

“It is thus that imagination can in the end determine destiny, and it but needs our future actions to be given shape in speech so that we are obliged to give them the reality of accomplishment.”
― Maurice Druon, La reina estrangulada

“But nations never die of the death of a man, however great he may have been; their birth and their death derive from other causes.”
― Maurice Druon, La reina estrangulada

“Even when we are punished for the wrong reasons, there is always a real cause for our punishment. Every unjust act, even committed for the sake of a just cause, carries its curse with it.”
― Maurice Druon, La reina estrangulada

“Several Mohammedan countries in North Africa and the Middle East are precisely in a period of fourteenth-century development and can show us, in a number of respects, a reflection of what the European medieval world was like. Similar towns, their houses piled one upon another, narrow swarming streets, enclosing a few sumptuous palaces; the same extremes of appalling misery among the poor and of opulence among great lords; the same story-tellers at the corners of the streets, propagating both myths and news; the same population, nine-tenths illiterate, submitting through long years to oppression and then suddenly rebelling violently in murderous panic; the same influence of religious conscience upon public affairs; the same fanaticism; the same intrigues among the powerful; the same hate among rival factions; the same plots so curiously ravelled that their solution lies only in the spilling of blood!”
― Maurice Druon, The Strangled Queen

“When one has governed men for a long time, when one has thought that one has acted for the best, when one knows the pains the task has entailed, and then suddenly sees that one has never been either loved or understood, but merely submitted to, then one is overwhelmed with bitterness, and wonders whether one could not have found some better way of spending one’s life.”
― Maurice Druon, The Strangled Queen

“The curse did not come from God. It emanated from himself and had no other source but in his own actions; and this was true of every man and of every punishment.”
― Maurice Druon, La reina estrangulada

“Every living man is alone, Louis,’ he said gravely. ‘Each one of us in his loneliness undergoes the moment of recognition of sin, and it is mere vanity to believe that there are not moments like this in life. Even the body of the wife with whom we sleep remains a stranger to us; even the children we have conceived are strangers… There is no help but in compassion and in the knowledge that others suffer as we do.”
― Maurice Druon, The Strangled Queen

“Every living man is alone, Louis,’ he said gravely. ‘Each one of us in his
loneliness undergoes the moment of recognition of sin, and it is mere vanity
to believe that there are not moments like this in life. Even the body of the
wife with whom we sleep remains a stranger to us; even the children we
have conceived are strangers...
There is no help but in compassion and in the
knowledge that others suffer as we do.”
― Maurice Druon, The Strangled Queen

“Oderisi took the paint-brush from between his teeth. ‘Alas,’ he replied, ‘it is finished.’ ‘Why alas?’ ‘Because I shall now be deprived of the happiness of seeing Donna Clemenzia every morning, and it will be as if the sun has gone out.’ This was merely a minor compliment, for to tell a Neapolitan woman, whether she be princess or merely serving-maid in a hotel, that one will fall gravely ill at not seeing her again is but the minimum obligation of courtesy.”
― Maurice Druon, The Strangled Queen

“He had governed men from so high a position and for so long that he had lost the knack of looking at them.”
― Maurice Druon, The Strangled Queen